"Merde!" I muttered angrily, but I handed over my chip rather than haggle over such a pittance with this churl for another moment. After the required credit was transferred, he held open the tent flap and admitted me to the unwholesome inner sanctum.
The interior of the tent was strewn with dusty and threadbare cushions. Upon these some dozen acolytes sat, reclined, or indeed dozed, in varying degrees of stupefaction, swilling wines and beers, sniffing at toxicants, and focusing various states of befuddled attention upon the figure propped up in a large nest of pillows in the center of the tent like some pathetic pasha.
Vraiment, it was Pater Pan.
But alas, not the Pater Pan I had known.
His Traje de Luces hung in loose folds about his gaunt frame. His golden hair and beard were unkempt and scraggly and streaked with gray. His skin was seamed and sallow, and there were hollows in his cheeks and dark baggy wrinkles under his eyes. His eyes ...
His wonderful blue eyes seemed larger and brighter than before, set off now in deep shadowed sockets, yet vague, and fragile somehow, like balls of shattered blue marble. About his brow was the metallic band of the Charge, wired to a console all but hidden within his throne of pillows.
A young girl stood before him intently as if receiving wisdom. And Pater Pan was indeed speaking, albeit with eyes that seemed focused on some middle distance, and in a hollow declamatory tone that seemed addressed to no one or everyone in particular.
"Tarry not in the mean streets of Hamelin town, but follow me into the Magic Mountain ..."
"Does that mean that I should now commence my wanderjahr?"
"Fear not the Gypsy King, gajo, for we must all one day be stolen from our parents' houses, and run away to join the circus ..."
"But now you say I must await a sign?"
"As a ronin, I know no master but honor ..."
"But --"
"Enough!" said an older girl squatting at the feet of Pater Pan. "You have already had fair value for your four credits!"
Eagerly, a boy arose from the front ranks and elbowed her aside, "How am I to gain the affection of Krista, Pater Pan?" he demanded.
"Be not a swinish wage slave of the Pentagon, but embark in the Gold Mountain on the long slow centuries between the stars, and follow the Arkie Spark within you ..."
I stood there in the back of the tent for many minutes, appalled, disgusted, transfixed, and despairing, as one by one paying customers were ushered in and out of the presence to hector Pater Pan with their picayune questions and receive in turn this Delphic babble.
I had sufficiently steeped myself in the scientific lore to know that what I beheld was a man who had long since gone beyond the point of no return on the path to the Up and Out.
"The King of the Gypsies is no more, long live the Prince of the Jokers, though of course they are very small mountains ..."
For while the cadences and music of this flow of words had a certain hypnagogic fascination that drew the mind's ear down into its murky depths, in truth, I knew, these were isolated and fragmented memory-quanta being released in the absence of a sovereign pattern. No Charge Addict who had progressed to this stage had ever returned as a sapient spirit to the worlds of men, for the integrated personality by now was not merely suppressed but erased forever, or so the mages declared, leaving only disconnected cerebral data banks firing off their memories at random.
"Before the singer, I was the song, which we followed along the Yellow Brick Road from the ancestral trees to trip the life fantastic out among the stars ..."
The Pater Pan whom I had known and loved was gone forever, or so science insisted, and were I to now rip the band from his head against all the efforts of these wretched acolytes to the contrary, all that I would succeed in rescuing would be a halfling creature such as I now beheld who would linger a few years thusly in the care of the Healers of some mental retreat.
I was too late. That faceless force which had claimed Guy Vlad Boca had somehow indeed contrived to claim even the noble Pater Pan, as if to avenge itself upon me for my singular triumph over it as the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt in the most ghastly manner at its disposal.
Yet if I could truly do nothing, neither could I let it be, for as Wendi would have had it, and as I now understood in a state of rage that transcended reason, now was the time for a futile gesture.
I strode boldly and forcefully to the front of the tent, superseding those waiting their turn at their oracle before me without demur, for the energy of my passage brooked none such in this company,
"Pater! It's Sunshine!" I cried.
"In the Summer of Love in the city by the bay, we all wore flowers in our hair ...."
His preternaturally bright yet entirely empty eyes seemed to stare right through me, and his babble, for all I could tell, was for the benefit of these callow creatures who hung on every word of it as much as for myself.
"Merde!" I shouted, fairly trembling with fury. "You are Pater Pan, and I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, and once we were friends and lovers in Great Edoku! Do you remember nothing of our time together?"
"The caravans of the Gypsies and the Tinkers singing the only tale there is to tell in the black forest of the night ..."
"Merde! Caga! Speak to me, Pater, as a natural man, and not as the voice from a cerebral whirlwind!"
"Cease addressing the master thusly!"
"You've had your four units' worth!"
"Give someone else their turn!"
I whirled on the clamor that had arisen behind me, feeling almost as much true personal puissance in this company as that which I thespically injected into my voice, "Silence, churls!" I commanded, "I am Sunshine Shasta Leonardo, the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt, and I would discourse with my old comrade and lover with no further unseemly interruption from the likes of you!"
While the chance that any of those present had the slightest notion of who or what the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt might be was vanishingly slim, so spiritless were these sorry excuses for Children of Fortune that my words, my demeanor, and the force behind them were quite sufficient to cow them. Far from mitigating my ire, the respectful attitudes of obeisance which they then all assumed, even down to the oracle's timekeeper, only served to arouse my utter contempt, for no true Child of Fortune of my acquaintance would have bowed so meekly to the mere assertion of authority.
"Remember, Pater, please remember," I cajoled Pater Pan, imploringly now, seeking to feel with my words for the smallest purchase with which to pry open this shell and reach the natural man within. "Remember when you were the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers? Remember? Do you not remember a time in a garden atop a waterfall? Do you not remember how I seized hold of your lingam in a shower stall? Do you not remember the Sunshine that you named? Do you not remember the night you told me what was in your heart of hearts?"
Pater Pan's face at last slowly turned in my direction like a leaf following the sun, but still his gaze seemed to stare right through me. "Remember ...?" he said. "Remember ...? Remember ...?"
"Yes, Pater, remember! Remember Sunshine, oh please, bitte, kudasai, liebchen, remember me!"
"Remember Sunshine ... I remember Sunshine beneath the towering red trees of the great forest ... I remember a Sunshine in my arms as we made love on the wing in the long slow centuries between the stars ... I remember a Sunshine on Novi Mir ... I remember a Sunshine on Edoku ... I remember a Sunshine on Elysium ... Remember the Sunshine of my life along the Yellow Brick Road ..."
This at last was far more than I could countenance! If the spell that I must counter was that of the electronic mastery of the Charge over the higher centers of his brain, if the power of the Word now failed me, then I must resort to the employment of electronic powers of my own. I must use the ring whose puissance I had not sought to employ for pleasure or gain since it had worse than failed me in the Perfumed Garden. I must resume my erotic career at once, any lack of piquant or quotidian desire to the contrary, for I could see nothing for it but to seize him by that kundalinic root which customarily overrides all cogitative imperatives when gripped by feminine force.
To wit, I thumbed on my ring of Touch, and to the oohs and gasps of the voyeurs in the tent, grabbed hold through the fabric of his trousers of his flaccid phallus. "If you remember nothing else, mon ami, mayhap you will remember this!"
Did his glassy eyes widen? Did some human light return thereto? Certainement, though with unseemly slowness, I felt the sap of manhood rise within my grasp. Strange indeed it was to feel the serpent stirring in a lingam once more after my long celibacy in a venue and a moment such as this! Stranger still, and somehow unwholesome, to feel the kundalinic knots uncoil within my own loins in such a pass, to find my natural woman once more via this most unnatural of tantric acts.
For long moments I stood there holding on for dear life to the handle of his phallus. For long moments did I gaze unwaveringly into his eyes, and for long moments did I imagine his true spirit looking back at me. Was it an extravagant fancy, or did I truly sense the hum and crackle of electronic combat between the dark power of the Charge and the kundalinic force at my command?
Be that as it may, at length his lips began to move again, and when they did, another spirit spoke, or so to me it seemed.
"The Sunshine of the magic touch ... She who out-joked the Joker ... On Edoku somewhere under the rainbow ..."
His voice grew firmer, as did his lingam in my hand, though the former still seemed to speak from very far away, and the latter only pulsed motionlessly in my grasp. "I remember a pool in a garden ... I remember a hand beneath a shower stall ... I remember a sister of the same spirit ..."
"Yes, Pater, yes!" I cried, squeezing the quick of him.
"I remember Great Edoku and I remember the ruins of We Who Have Gone Before and Babylon and Tyre I remember the summer of love and the night of the generals and I remember clambering from the trees to gaze in newborn wonder upon the sapient sunrise above the plain ...."
Merde, he was drifting away again, or mayhap he had never truly been there! Had it been only a chance concatenation of neurons firing in a burning brain which had seemed to speak for a moment as the natural man? Be that as it may, it was that natural man I had come here to hear; not the oracle of these worshipful urchins, but he who had chosen for reasons unknown to give his spirits over to the mercies, tender or otherwise, of the Charge, nor would I be content until I had summoned that Pater Pan forth and demanded why.
"No more of this Delphic babble!" I cried, yanking at his phallus as if I might extract by brute force alone that natural man. "Speak from the heart! How could you of all men have surrendered your spirit to the vileness of the Charge? Speak in the name of the spirit we once shared!"
Did I imagine now that a pale ghost of the old spark had returned to his eyes? Was that a rueful smile upon his lips?
"Moussa ..." he said. "My teller of tales has come to say good-bye ..."
"Why must you say good-bye, Pater? Why must this horrid thing be?"
"Je ne sais pas, muchacha," Pater Pan said, and now I was certain it was in some sense he. "All our Yellow Brick Roads must have an ending, though no one has ever told us why ..."
"Is this the man who once swore to experience all the far-flung worlds of men and bear witness to our species' tale entire?" I demanded behind tear-filled eyes.
"C'est moi, muchacha, he who rode the Arkie Spark through the long slow centuries in dreamless sleep, and who now has lost his race against time, which in the end not even I could win."
With a dreadful new understanding, I regarded his sunken frame, his fraying hair well-streaked with gray, his seamed and leathery skin. Thus had the dying babas of the Bloomenveldt appeared as they sat before their final flowers. The body's time had caught up to the spirit of the eternal Gypsy Joker at last, the hand of death lay on his shoulder.
"I remember all that I've ever been, muchacha, and even more that I haven't, and I remember all I said good-bye to before you summoned me forth," Pater Pan said, in a pained and mournful voice that had me fighting back sobs. "Only now I have to remember what we all spend our lives seeking to forget."
"Oh Pater, why?" I said tearfully. "If all our lives must end, must the noble tale of yours end like this?"
"The Inuit walks tranquilly out upon the ice to sit for one last eternal night under the frozen time of the stars. In Han of old at the end of our days we gave ourselves over to the poppy's lotus breath when the time came to let go our place upon the wheel. The Arkie freezes his Spark in the long slow centuries between the stars. The sage quaffs his psychotropic hemlock. The Prince of the Jokers travels, snap! snap! snap! like the Rapide into the Up and Out."