"Sunshine! Sunshine!" Wendi was shaking me by the shoulders. "Are you all right?"
I blinked. I shuddered. Something grew coldly determined inside of me. At length I made to answer this most foolish of questions. "I have my senses about me if that is what you mean," I found myself saying. "Of course we both realize that I must go to Florida the moment this ship reaches Alpa."
Emotions recomplicated in the backwash of the shock into a complexity I could scarcely comprehend. Once had I rescued Guy from the Charge's vile embrace by force of will and arms, and yet all my efforts failed to rescue him from his perfect flower, and I was forced to abandon the spirit of a true friend and lover in order to save my own. Now he whose spirit had warped space and time to be at my side in the Dreamtime in my hour of need on the Bloomenveldt stood in the same peril from which I had once rescued Guy. Surely the survival of my own spirit was hardly in question this time! Surely I could not once more abandon a friend and lover to pitiless fate, to whatever demon of his own spirit had impelled him to this seppuku of the soul!
All this came out through my lips in that statement of cold unshakable determination, and all of it Wendi seemed to apprehend therein. "Of course you must, my poor liebchen," she said with sympathetic softness. "Were I you, I would shame myself if I did less than the same ..."
She hugged me for a moment and then released me. "I would accompany you to Florida if you wish," she said, "but this offer is only another futile gesture in the interests of friendship, ne."
"Indeed, Wendi," I told her softly. "But understand that I refuse it in the same tender spirit with which it was extended."
"Well spoken, friend and colleague," she said. "I will tarry in Lorienne, which passes for Alpa's main metropole, and await your arrival, for now my previous offer in my editorial capacity is canceled, and we must end the Tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt with whatever happens in Florida."
"I can promise you nothing, Wendi," I told her in all honesty, "not even that we will ever see each other again."
"Hola, but I can promise you two things in compensation, liebchen," Wendi Sha Rumi told me. "First, that the tale will end as they all do and another begin, though there is no way your heart can believe it now, and second that if you can find a way to make this ending of your tale sing sweetly to the spirit, I will freely acknowledge you as a more perfect master of our mutual art than I."
***
I passed the hours between my awakening to this bitter news and the arrival of the Arrow of Time at Alpa learning all I could about the Charge, for I was no longer the naive young girl who had ventured out upon the perils of the Bloomenveldt foolishly and blissfully unprepared by study of the dangers of the psychic terrain. But what I learned in the perusal of this lore, alas, did little but daunt my spirit.
The Charge, as I had already known, amplified the electro-hologram of human consciousness without distorting the topology thereof, so that what Charge Addicts claimed to experience was an enhancement of subjective consciousness without relative distortion of the pre-existing personality.
But since each increment of Charge achieves an increment of amplification at the expense of the stability of the overall pattern, the "personality" of the Charge Addict grows less and less defined, much as the resolution of a visual holo image, while not distorted by the destruction of areas of the recording medium, becomes vaguer and vaguer, until the terminal phase is reached in the Up and Out.
While all the monographs I perused remained in accord up to this point, like the personality of the Charge Addict itself, that which was said to be known about the nature of what emerges in the Up and Out grew vaguer, more fragmented, and more nebulous the further the mages sought to delve into this arcane realm.
Some called it a series of "pseudopersonalities" generated by the random firing of neurons in cerebral memory banks from which the individuality of the previous occupant had been erased. Others contended that species genetic coding kicked up into the vacated electrohologramic level, and that it was the archetypes supposedly stored as the collective unconscious in our gene pool which manifested themselves.
As for what spoke toward the very end, upon this subject, only the devotees of the Charge themselves would speculate, and as one might expect, they were uniformly of the opinion that the Atman itself merged with their spirits in the actual moment of the Up and Out.
Small wonder then that there were those who still sought Delphic pronouncements from the lips of such oracles, for alors, were not all the religions of primitive man but the willed belief that by following their precepts, practices, and esoteric rituals, such a living nirvana might be achieved this side of death? Vraiment, have not such psychonauts of thanatopsis always been our shamans?
And are such shamans, or at any rate pretenders to their throne, really absent in our sophisticated and enlightened Second Starfaring Age? Was not Cort, my psychonaut lover in Nouvelle Orlean, such a one? And Raul? And Imre? And the dying babas of the Bloomenveldt? And most of all, Guy Vlad Boca, who had found the perfect amusement of his short lifelong quest in the Perfumed Garden of his perfect flower.
But Pater Pan? No amount of exhaustive research could cause me to even imagine how the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers could fall victim to the thanatotic seduction of the Charge. Not the Pied Piper of Pan, for whom the goal had always been a journey with no final destination, not he who had sworn to see all the worlds of men and the whole of our species tale or nobly expire in the futile attempt. How could such a man have chosen to end his tale in vicious farce, as a Charge Addict expiring in a small city on a planet of no particular renown?
I knew not. I understood it not. Yet soon enough I would confront the inescapable reality thereof. Nor would all the powers of my spirit or the desires of my heart in the end prevail against it.
Chapter 29
Florida was a small city built between a wide crescent of beach along a tropical bay and a low range of wooded maritime alps, mere hills if truth be told, which neatly defined its inland boundaries, though as one would expect, many of the most extravagant manses were sited along the haute corniche which ran just below the crestline on the seaside slope. The bay was blue, the sands quite a striking rose, and the foliage of the hillsides tended to pastel tones of reddish-green. The sky was a brilliant azure, and the waters of the bay were sprinkled with a score or more small sandy islands upon which grew no more than sparse clumps of some purplish salt grass.
Amusement piers and covered pavilions jutted out into the bay here and there and the waters themselves sported all manner of pleasure craft, though sails seemed to be favored, and blue, rose, and white were the dominant tints thereof.
Indeed to style Florida a small city might be going too far, for in truth it was more of a large town decorating the bay with a fringe of low and deliberately unobtrusive buildings whose precincts could be covered from end to end on a balmy afternoon's stroll. By unstated agreement, mayhap by legislative fiat, no structure rose more than four stories, and most were done up in white, rose. or blue, so as to harmonize with the color scheme of the landscape. As for fabriks, these were nowhere in evidence, and those edifices given over to commerce were confined to small inns, restaurants, boutiques, tavernas, and the like. Some small open floatcabs were available, but for the most part the populace seemed to favor traveling afoot.
In short, upon debarking at seaside from the hover which had borne me from Lorienne, I found myself in a scene of bucolic tranquility and benign isolation from the hurly-burly of the centers of the civilized worlds, a venue for vacationers and sportsvolk or for those who preferred a vie of mellow retreat from urban complexities. Strange to say, the ambiance thereof put me in mind of Nouvelle Orlean somehow, after so many weeks of treetop wilderness on the one hand, and the flagrantly ersatz environments of Edoku, Ciudad Pallas, and Void Ships on the other, though certainement Florida was Nouvelle Orlean writ quite small and modest.
As for locating the venue where Pater Pan was most likely to be found. this was simplicity itself, for even from the beach I could readily enough spy out a sprinkling of varicolored tents set on a shelf of land about three quarters of the way up the slope of an overlooking hillside.
Eschewing floatcabs, I forthwith set out inland afoot through the streets of the town toward the hillside in question. These were paved, or rather strewn, with a particolored gravel made up of tiny marine shells and the fragments of larger ones which crunched pleasantly enough underfoot as one trod upon them.
The denizens of the town seemed divided up into two distinct species: somewhat pallid urbanites obviously on holiday, and well-bronzed natives who were clearly in the minority. Breechclouts, shorts, halters, und so weiter were the favored attire, nor were nude bodies lacking, though naturellement the esthetic effect of all this bare flesh was a good deal more pleasing when it came to the handsome natives than when it came to the turistas. Peculiarly enough, though there was a plethora of youth in evidence, and though such a resort community would seem to be ideal for such enterprises, there seemed to be no organized troupes of buskers, hawkers, ruespielers, und so weiter on these promising streets.
Nevertheless, the sun shone brightly, the town presented a pleasing aspect, the balmy air was redolent with vegetative sweetness and salty sea-tang. and my spirits soared against all knowledgeable trepidations, for it was difficult indeed to credit such a setting as the venue for such dark and urban horrors as Charge Addiction.
Nor was my mood anything but lightened when, puffing a bit and lightly filmed with sweat, I reached the shelf upon which the caravanserei was situated. While this encampment had nothing of the size and grandeur of that which the Gypsy Jokers had established in Great Edoku, the sight of it filled my heart with a rosy nostalgic glow for the Golden Summer I had enjoyed as a newborn Child of Fortune therein. And though this encampment boasted no more than a score or two tents of various sizes, shapes, and colors, the view therefrom put what I had known in Edoku to shame. From the outskirts of the caravanserei, I looked out over the shaggy shoulders of the hillside, down across the tiny houses of the town and the shining rose-colored beach to a shining azure sea upon which minuscule sails of blue and white and rose drifted in the breezes like a swarm of brightly-colored sea-midges.
Only when I entered the encampment itself did the spell of peaceful and perfect beauty begin to unravel.
For one thing, there was a preponderance of scarcely-pubescent Alpans in evidence, obviously hardly of an age to be Children of Fortune of other worlds embarked upon their wanderjahrs, and while some of these wore the Cloth of Many Colors, their scarves and sashes were patched together out of swatches of new cloth rather than being the fairly-won emblems of a wandering vie.
Moreover, and more disturbing still, there was almost nothing in the way of crafts or finger food or street theater troupes or musicians or even tantric performers to be seen, as if, as I soon found out to be true, this encampment was living primarily on the largesse of not-too-distant parents. The few true Children of Fortune that I spied seemed a rather unwholesome lot, too long in the tooth for the vie, mayhap predators gathered to prey upon the energies, not to say the parental subsidies, of the young Alpans.
As for the activities which were taking place, these were hardly calculated to cast credit on the mythos. Many young folk were lying about in an obvious state of red-eyed stupefaction. Others could be seen gulping down great drafts of wine or imbibing various toxicants, and what commerce I noted was mainly in these commodities. Here and there couples, and groups were engaged in rather feckless tantric exercises of little or no artistry and not much more energy. Scraps of food were scattered everywhere as well as empty flagons attended by small yellow insects, and the general aroma, if not quite overpowering, reeked more of decaying organic matter and unwashed bodies than of perfumed incenses and cuisinary savors.
I loathed the ambiance I experienced as I wandered the camp under the indifferent gazes of its inhabitants, which is to say I dreaded what I would discover at its center, for I knew only too well who and what that would be. Nor was I long in seeking out the locus thereof, for near the center of the encampment was the largest tent of all, a closed pavilion sewn together out of Cloth of Many Colors.
I was accosted at the flap which concealed the interior of the tent by a rather scruffy and bleary- eyed fellow perhaps five years my senior who barred my way and thrust a chip transcriber under my nose. "Four credit units for an audience with the Oracle," he told me.
"What? Quelle chose? What is this outrage?"
"A small price to pay for the true voice of the Up and Out," he said with lofty diffidence. "Try to obtain the same elsewhere on Alpa at more modest cost if you wish, and see how far it will get you."