Child of Fortune (19 page)

The latter I could well imagine." All very well for the wandering cocksman," I told him, "but now that we are a menage a deux, we shall require furnishings more appropriate to genteel domesticity, ne. You can hardly expect me to share a bed of branches in an empty tent."

At this, Pater sat upright and regarded me first with surprise, then with consternation, and finally with a certain knowing ruefulness. "Whoa, lady, you seem to be laboring under a whole series of misapprehensions," he said not unkindly. He patted the bed beside him. "Setzen sic sich, girl, and receive enlightenment."

I liked the sound of it not at all; nevertheless I did as he asked, though not without a tremor of trepidation, and not without the maintenance of a certain physical distance congruent with my sudden unease.

"You cannot be more than twenty standard years old, ne?" he said. "Whereas I have traveled the worlds of men for millennia ..."

"Such hyperbole is all very well for poetic boastings for the mystification of rubes," I snapped, "but hardly suitable to a serious discussion of matters of the heart en boudoir! No human may attain the age of four hundred, and the scientific reasons therefor have been known for centuries."

"Ah, but I speak of time, not age, Moussa, and in our Second Starfaring Age, these are not bound so tightly together, ne. Greater mysteries aside, we do not slowly decay into dotage as men once did, but all at once, when our nervous systems wear out. So, for all you know, in span of my body's years, I could be three hundred as easily as thirty ..."

"Thirty, three hundred, three thousand, je ne sais pas!" I declared. "What has all this talk of age and time to do with us?"

"All," he said flatly. "Believe it or not, believe at least that 1 believe that I've been around the worlds of men longer than even I can remember. Knowing me as you already do, for sure you can believe that the last several thousands of years were not quite passed in monkish celibacy, which is to say I am far more experienced in affairs of the heart than you, or at least I have known as many .women as you have days."

"Now at least I surmise that you speak sans hyperbole," I admitted dryly.

"Bien. And I tell you true, their spirits were as precious to me in their time as yours is now."

"Spirits?" I sniffed. "you would have me believe you have cherished several thousand lovers for their spirits?"

Pater shrugged. "Am I not a man of great charisma?" he said. "Am I not the cocksman supreme? Do you imagine I am anything less than a perfect master of seduction? Is it not the fact that I am a universal object of feminine desire precisely the cause of your present pique?"

"And modest to a fault as well," I said, hardly able to believe that I had in fact heard such incredible boasting from the lips of mortal man. But unable to deny the obnoxious truth either.

But Pater Pan did not laugh. Instead, his face became a visage of such intense sincerity, he regarded me with a look of such caritas and tenderness, that somehow he managed to make himself seem like a hero for having the spiritual courage to utter the very words which the previous moment had marked him as a boor and a braggart. Never had a man looked at me thusly. Never had a spirit touched mine so deeply or inspired such totally irrational trust. Never had I felt such love.

"Do you imagine that such a man need grant his favors to any who has not touched his heart?" he said.

"It was not precisely your heart that I touched in the shower stall. ..." I reminded him.

Once again, Pater did not so much as smile at my jape, indeed he came as close as I had ever seen to an impatient frown. "Merde, muchacha, be real!" he said. "Do you imagine that I have not been the object of more such ploys than I could count? Do you imagine that my lingam rules my heart? Do you really believe I knew not your true intention, namely to achieve exactly what you have?"

My ears burned. My eyes began to tear. "What a silly little fool you must have thought I was ..." I whispered forlornly. Yet still I could not avert my gaze from the depths of his bright blue eyes.

Nor his from mine, "Fool?" he exclaimed. "Your courage and your guile won my heart!"

"They did?"

Now Pater broke into a boyish grin that made me want to laugh, though I knew not why. "It takes one to know one, n'est-ce pas?" he said. "Have I not lived by just such courage and guile for all these centuries? How could an ego as massive as that of the great Pater Pan fail to love a spirit in which he sees to his delight the mirror of his own?"

Now I did laugh as I felt a great weight lifted from my spirit by his words. Pater sprang from the bed and began pacing as he spoke, or rather declaimed in the thespic style of his name tale, and now as then, a mighty spirit seemed to be speaking through him, but now, via his bright blue eyes which never broke contact with my own, I felt it moving through me as well, as if we were two singers who had become the music of a single song.

"Ah, Moussa, we are two avatars of a single spirit, you and I, sister and brother, and equal lovers, no matter that you have hardly begun to walk the Yellow Brick Road, and I have been the Piper of the dance time out of mind on a hundred worlds and more. Are we not true Gypsies and true Jokers, Children of the same Fortune? That is why you are now in this encampment, not because you knotted my lingam around your finger, but because you out-Joked the Joker, and out-Gypsied the Gypsy, and proved thereby that you belonged to the tribe by droit d'esprit, a Gypsy Joker of the true spirit before you even knew the name!"

Then all at once he collapsed back onto the bed and be. came the mere man and trickster once more." And that is why I am not about to let you live with me in this tent or delude yourself that you or any other woman can be my one and only, girl," he said. "Could I be so heartless as to deprive the women of the worlds of the full glory of my being? Could I be such a jealous churl as to deprive the men of the worlds of the full glory of yours?"

"What a farrago of self-serving merde!" I exclaimed in wounded anger. "What high-sounding rhetoric to justify what low-minded lust!"

Pater only smiled at me warmly in a superior manner that further inflamed my rage against him. "Would not such a low-minded swine of selfish lust play a lower-minded game? Would he not encourage the delusion that, given time and patience and a casual enough disregard for his peccadilloes, you could make him your own?"

"You believe that I would watch you play the stud to the entire barnyard and loyally await my turn at your favors in hope thereby of cozening you into mending your ways?" I snapped.

Pater Pan seemed to stare right into my soul. He placed a gentle hand upon my knee. "Can you look me in the eye and honestly declare that if I had never spoken this truth you would not?" he said all-too-knowingly.

I could not reply. Indeed, I could no longer even meet his gaze.

"How long before such a love turned to hate?" Pater persisted. "Vraiment, even if you caponized the cock, would you not lose as much as I?"

"May I not at least be permitted to be the judge of that?" I muttered bleakly.

Pater cupped my chin in his hands and raised my eyes to meet his own. "So be it, girl," he said. "Suffer one more long-winded koan, after which you have only to say so, and I will be forever yours."

Once more that preternatural spirit seemed to emerge from manly flesh to speak to its own avatar with ill my heart, but now my lover spoke as well, or so it seemed, with a human warmth even I in such a moment could not deny.

"I have known thousands of women on hundreds of worlds and you may hap a few score fellows on a world or two. Yet tell me true if you can that you in your short span have been any more addicted to pacts of eternal monogamy than I!"

At this, I was constrained to merely curl my lips, for of course no such vows had ever passed through them, nor indeed had such thoughts previously even trammeled my admittedly somewhat fickle heart.

"We are Children of the same spirit, ne, you and I," Pater went on relentlessly. "What sort of man, what a false Child of Fortune, would I be to allow a lover to tie herself to me and lose thereby that very spirit which she loves in me, which has made me what I am? Vraiment, to turn her back on the Yellow Brick Road after her first few steps thereon?"

He smiled. He took my hand in his. "Instead, why not a treaty of equal spirits, one Gypsy Joker to another? Take from a lover's hand this carnival, and Edoku, and all the worlds of men beyond. Let me be your lover, and you be mine, but live the life that I have lived, be true to the spirit that we share. Eat, drink, toxicate yourself, wander, learn, adventure, dare all, have ten lovers, a hundred, a thousand, vie with the great Pater Pan in running up the score, and become thereby not my spouse but a true consort of my heart! For what do I lose thereby? What substance is depleted? And you have worlds to gain that I already know. So allow me to give a greater gift than what you seek, chere Moussa, the gift of freedom as my lover and an equal spirit. And in return, only seek not to diminish mine."

I trembled at the touch of his hand, I knew not how to reply, for the greater part of me wished to gather up this wise and noble creature in my arms, while the worm of intellect whispered in my ear that I was somehow only the latest victim of this perfect master of the truthful lie.

"Well?" said Pater. "Which do you choose? Sister and brother of the same free spirit? Or dour misers of the heart?"

Put thusly, was not the question its own answer? Even now, with hindsight's wisdom long years and many lovers after the fact, still I cannot find the flaw in his irrefutable logic d'amour. Nor, on the other hand, can I escape from the entirely illogical conviction that it was there.

I shook my head ruefully, acknowledging that I was in the presence of a perfect master, though of what I was not quite sure. "You have the tongue of an angel and the guile of a Serpent," I told him. "Why then, knowing this, do I now trust such a monster with my heart?"

Pater laughed. He hugged me to him and kissed me on the lips. With a great relenting sigh, I snuggled into his embrace. "Because," he said, "beneath the mythos and blarney of the great Pater Pan, there is nothing more sinister than the soul of a little boy."

***

I slept that night in the arms of Pater Pan, or rather he allowed himself to innocently repose in mine after a somewhat briefer passage d'amour than our first mighty duet, which served, nevertheless, to reaffirm my arcane tantric mastery over his flesh and to reaffirm his primacy, despite all, in my heart, and thus to fairly seal our bizarre "treaty of equal spirits."

Vraiment, in the days and weeks to come we slept together thusly often enough, and if I had given up all hope of becoming the exclusive consort of the cock of the walk, I could content myself with the admission, wrested from his panting lips by the magic of the Touch, that I could, whenever the spirit moved me, not merely please him like no other lover , but overmaster, outlast, and outpleasure this most puissant of cocksmen, and leave him gasping limply and crying "Enough!"

Indeed having established myself in my own mind and his as the secret mistress of the ultimate object of feminine desire in open competition, I began to appreciate the wisdom of the pact he had forced upon me. Though at first I sulked and pouted when I spied Pater engaged in intimacies with others, soon enough I began to take a certain satisfaction in this erotic competition, in which, courtesy of the art of Leonardo, I was assured of certain, if not exactly sporting, victory.

Moreover, once my full confidence in my own erotic puissance had thereby been restored, I regained once more the spirit of that Moussa Shasta Leonardo who had been in her own small way no mean femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean. I took to denying my favors to Pater from time to time for my own amusement. I dallied with lesser males of the tribe and soon developed a reputation as a tantric performer of preternatural power and some artistry.

Soon enough I was invited to take minor parts in tantric group performances in which the audience participated actively and met with the general approval of same via the raw power of the Touch, though the featured performers would often chide me for upstaging their more demanding roles.

When it came to performing in tantric tableaus in which the audience remained passive spectators, however, I was a good deal less successful, since the employment of the Touch therein did nothing for the audience and tended to disrupt the concentration of the ensemble with ill-timed orgasms, and when I therefore confined myself to ordinary performance of my modest roles, my relative lack of studied artistry was all too apparent.

Nevertheless, the cachet derived from being even a minor and occasional public performer, combined with the electronically enhanced certainty of providing fair value, allowed me to earn some ruegelt as solo tantric artist, though I never summoned up the hubris or courage to demand more than twenty pieces of ruegelt from a customer.