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For PHILIP K. DICK
Some
stand on the shoulders of giants CHILD
OF FORTUNE "I
think this is the finest philosophical novel writen in the last 50 years
in America ....It concerns our future, in which we have solved the
problems of competition, war, greed, and so on, and the real problems are
psychological and spiritual. This is a monumental book." And so, after half a lifetime and some score histoires telling the eternal tale in all its timebound incarnations, I venture herein at last to speak my own wanderjahr's story from the memories of the heart. Wandering tinker and masterless samurai, troubadour and hippie, Rom and Arkie, Zen hermit and cowboy--uncounted avatars of the archetypal wanderkind have followed the Yellow Brick Road which wanders eternally through space and time from the villages and forests of prehistoric Earth to the San Franciscos and Samarkands of myth and history, via the first arkologies to brave the starry seas at a sublight crawl, and thence to the celestial cities of the far-flung worlds of men. The singers and the avatars pass, but the song goes on, for the story is always the same: that of the wanderjahr, the eternal journey from childhood to maturity through the wondrous and terrible chaos of the region between. This too is a histoire of that archetype as it is incarnated in our own era: The Child of Fortune whom we have all been or will become. But herein will the detached observer shed all pretense of objectivity, for this is my name tale's story, this is my wanderjahr's song. So in this modern version of the timeless histoire, our ingenue begins the tale as the little Moussa on Glade, and the Yellow Brick Road she follows leads from planet to planet, and she travels not by horse or motorad but by Void Ship. In this histoire as in all my others, you will meet the avatars of the great and eternal journey of youth into maturity, of spirit into culture, of the comrades of the passage from what we dream into what we are destined to become. But here you will meet them as did this Child of our Second Starfaring Age: as friends and lovers, freeservants and ruespielers, Charge Addicts, Honored Passengers, domos and mages, and the wandering children of all the worlds of men who were ourselves. So this, my own wanderjahr's story, is also the tale of that journey which goes on above and below the historical annals. In the Second Starfaring Age we call that journey, as in another era deep in the past, the wanderjahr, though for some it is measured in weeks and for others in lifetimes. By whatever name that passage has been called--wanderjahr, summer of love, grailquest, voyage d'ark--until I took the freenom Wendi and began writing my histoires, it was a tale that what we have called "history" had ignored. For "history" is the story of deeds done by those who have shaped the evolution of the species humaine, from the nameless hominid who crafted the first tool to the inventors of fire and the wheel, to the organizations that put the first humans into orbit and onto Earth's moon, to the builders of the arkologies that first brought men to the stars, to those who developed the Jump Drive out of the mysterious artifacts left by We Who Have Gone Before and thereby inaugurated our Second Starfaring Age. Those whose names are known to "history" have been scientists and explorers and politicians and generals and creative artists. They have elucidated the laws of nature, invented wondrous devices, established nations, waged wars, found new habitable worlds, created lasting works of art, and indeed have been those who recorded "history" itself. For "history" is the timebound story of the evolution of specific human societies. But outside of history there is another story just as ancient, the story of that which has always existed outside, within, and as often as not in opposition to "society," yet which in another and deeper sense has carried the true esprit humaine forward to this day. It has been called many things by many cultures. The Romany Road. Bohemia. Counterculture. The Floating World. The Underground. Arkie Sparkie. Demimonde. Its denizens too have been known by many names, most of them pejorative. Ronin. Gypsies. Freaks. Wayfarers. Tinkers. Arkies. Until the Second Starfaring Age, this eternal demimonde could be defined only by what it was not. A "culture" in essence consisted of the social, political, economic, cuisinary, linguistic, technological, and esthetic patterns shared in common by its citizens; on a deeper level, it was the consensus reality, the consciousness style which defined a "people." The demimonde, then, was the psychic heimat of those, who, through choice or fortune, existed within the spacial bounds of a culture but outside its consensus reality. Hence outside both "the law" and "history." Here were to be found the criminals and social pariahs, the madmen and ethnic outcasts, the devotees of socially proscribed vices and the followers of gods other than those of the local tribe. But here too were the visionaries born outside their proper time, the artists who created new styles of consciousness, the seekers and the dreamers--in essence all those whose spirits could not be contained by the parameters of the consensus reality of their given social realm. Here was the heimat of Chaos in its eternal dialectic with Order, the Chaos out of which all new culture, hence history itself, has always evolved. Here, in other words, was the psychic heimat of the adventurous spirit of youth. To the demimonde was drawn both the best and the worst of a culture's youth--the dreamers and the rebels, the idealists and the psychopaths, the artistic and the indolent, the seekers after vice and the seekers after Enlightenment. Some sojourned a while in the realm of Chaos and emerged once more as history's movers and shapers. Some passed through their wanderjahr and grew only old. Some were lost forever. A few remained young forever until the day they died. But all too many adolescents in all too many cultures never passed through Chaos at all. They were born, they were acculturated, they were schooled, they took up their adult stations in life, passed through an ill-defined period of mid-life angst, resigned themselves to old age, and died, without ever walking the Yellow Brick Road, indeed without ever understanding what it was that they had missed in their lives. Unwritten though it was until I began creating my histoires, this too is now a kind of history, in the sense that it is a story of humanity past. Today, in our Second Starfaring Age, that ancient concept of "culture" as the prison of individual consciousness is happily gone. As each of us speaks our own sprach of Lingo, so is each human consciousness its own self-created style of reality, unique to itself, yet part of the infinitely complex vie humaine. For each of us passes through our wanderjahr as a Child of Fortune; rare indeed is the child of our age who becomes a man or woman without having passed through the region between. What is the greatest glory and proudest achievement of the Second Starfaring Age? The Jump Drive which enables our Void Ships to traverse the great and empty distances between the stars and enables us thereby to spread our species to hundreds of worlds? That humanity has finally put war and chauvinism far behind it? Our total knowledge of mass-energy phenomena? I say that the greatest achievement of the Second Starfaring Age, that which sets us above and apart from all previous human civilizations in spirit and not merely in artifact, is that our civilization alone has had the wisdom to decree the wanderjahr for all. For while some of us create histoires and some of us are Void Captains or mages or political leaders, und so weiter, all of us have been Children of Fortune. Indeed, is not the choosing of one's freenom the declaration of the lifeswork to come, and is the freenom not chosen at the end of the wanderjahr, and is not the wanderjahr the very process by which we, as Children of Fortune, find our destiny and ourselves? Moreover, since each of us has tasted the freedom and the peril of the Child of Fortune, indeed since each of us remains a Child of Fortune until we have surfeited ourselves with the vie, unlike parents of previous ages, we seek not to chain the child to the cradle, the eaglet to the nest, we envy not our children the Golden Summer we ourselves have known and relinquished only voluntarily when we have found our own true names. And here is the story of mine, of how the little Moussa became the very Wendi Shasta Leonardo who now tells this, her wanderjahr's tale. Once within our time, on a planet not so very far away ... |