Free Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad Page A

asteroid.
     
    What had appeared to be a solid mountain from its meadowed crest and a substantial building as I drifted down its hollow core now seemed to be a floating confection from my present vantage, for the building ended a good twenty meters from the floor, held aloft by the same sort of gravitic machineries which had enabled me to drift down like a speck of dust and which now informed my motor senses that I weighed no more than the moussas which as a babe I had held in the palm of my hand.
     
    I stood there with the enormous mountain of a building floating above my head like an immense parasol while a three hundred sixty-degree panorama of the immediate environs surrounded me, each few points of the compass, moreover, offering their own hour and season, tempting me with the illusion that I stood at the fulcrum of space and time, though in my present psychic circumstances I knew full well that, here in Edoku, nothing could be further from the truth.
     
    On my right hand, I was offered what might have been an arrondissement of small residences piled up the sides of low hills with only a few folk to be seen abroad to welcome the dawn. Some degrees further, an afternoon parkland with a lakeful of small boats, sunbathers on the lawn, more athletic Edojin engaged in arcane sport and al fresco amour. Or I could venture down the narrow midnight streets of some sort of pleasure district, thronged with revelers crowding between tall and garishly lit emporiums. I might wander among the enormous succulents and little gazebos set in sunset desert sands or ascend to the ridgeline of a miniature range of mountains circled by what might have been manses or just as easily fabriks.
     
    In truth, I knew not where to begin, nor what to begin, nor did I have guide or knowledge or the foggiest notion of how to orient myself in this chaotic terrain. Giddy and toxicated already, and growing discomforted by both my indecision and the psychic weight of the mountain floating above my head, I resolved to let fortune decide, and so, closing my eyes, I spun around until I was truly dizzy, then ceased whirling and bounced airily off towards the pleasure streets of midnight, which were the next sight to greet my eyes.
     
    ***
     
    How long did I wander through Edoku in a toxicated fog? How may duration be measured where midnight is a few steps from dawn and one may stroll in a minute or two from spring into fall? Naturellement, one may consult one's timepiece, but what sort of spirit resorts to such digital measurement in elf hill? Certainement not the spirit of the virgin Child of Fortune that I was, enraptured by an endless succession of marvelous, chaotic, and upon occasion daunting realities, such as Cort and I had never succeeded in conjuring from quotidian Nouvelle Orlean or our own psyches even during our most prolonged and eclectic seances with the psychoactive pharmacopoeia.
     
    Though in truth, of all the knowledge, skills, and lore that I had acquired in my previous incarnation on Glade, it was precisely my experiences with a plethora of psychochemically altered reality states which stood me in best stead on my initial wanderings in Edoku. While with Cort the perception of an entirely fragmented and disconnected succession of bizarre and unpredictable realities was entirely the result of alteration in the biochemical matrix of the consciousness perceiving them, and on Edoku it was the environment itself which rang the changes, the psychic state induced thereby was subjectively the same, to wit an entirely fractured consciousness wandering through them totally immersed in the immediate moment-to-moment flow of the fine details of chaos sans any overview integrated over space and time.
     
    There were cafe tables of living wood arising from the gilded pavement of midnight streets, mighty towers of glass and stone set in avenues among miniature mountain ranges bustling with urban commerce in the earnest early morning light, a twilit