Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online Page B

your terms for my wanderjahr to include, mayhap, passage to five planets of my own choosing as an Honored Passenger, and a living subsidy which, with reasonable prudence, will last me for a full year. In which case, in loving deference to your trepidations, I will reluctantly forgo the Edoku of my heart's desire ..."
     
    At this suggestion, naturellement, their discomfort took on a certain glowering tone. "We will speak of this again shortly," my father said unhappily, rising from the breakfast table. "I have clients to attend to at the moment."
     
    Before he could entirely depart, my mother, with a worried look, touched his arm. "You and I must speak of this, Leonardo," she said firmly.
     
    So, in the succeeding days they did, and so too did they apply their own versions of the charm, and wheedling, and pouting with which I had so unsuccessfully attempted to sway their wills when the shoe, as it were, had been on the other foot, though unlike me, they were above resorting to fits of pique or thespic appearances in a toxicated state.
     
    The gist of their campaign was to convince me that a naif such as myself from a planet such as Glade -- which they now attempted to portray as little more than a frontier world inhabited entirely by bumpkins -- would have little chance of amassing credits against the sophisticated competition I would encounter for same on a world like Edoku. To which I inevitably replied that I was a sophisticated child of mighty Nouvelle Orlean, which was hardly to be likened to the society of a peasantry living in rude log huts, and that I was merely determined to follow their own sage advice and brave the vie of the true Child of Fortune to the utmost.
     
    To their credit, honor forbade them to either deny me the passage to the single planet of my choice that they had promised or bribe me away from my chosen path by relenting on their financial terms for my wanderjahr. Indeed mayhap to my credit, by the time it became necessary to purchase my passage on the Bird of Night three days before departure, I doubt whether such a bribe would have any longer swayed my resolve to brave the golden streets of Great Edoku, for necessity had proven the mother of desire, and by then I was all but convinced that I had chosen this course entirely of my own free will.
     
    And so the die of my fortune was finally cast, passage booked, and my parents, so the events of the next morning were to prove, reconciled to the inevitable, at least to the point of providing, in perhaps somewhat desperate aid of my survival on Edoku, and inspired by my father's protective desires, the latest miracle of Leonardo's art.
     
    After breakfast, and before opening his boutique to the public, Leonardo, with Shasta in train, ushered me into the workshop area and extracted from a cubby a simple and in fact tawdry-looking ring such as might be purchased in the most modest of street bazaars on the poorest of planets. A simple golden band -- in fact upon second glance a not-very-cunning job of gold plating over synthetic -- adorned, if that is the word, by a single over-large glob of ersatz which might conceivably have convinced a three-year-old that it was a sapphire.
     
    This ugly and patently worthless bijou my father slipped upon my right ringfinger as portentously and proudly as if it were the priceless relic of some ancient emperor's crown jewels, while I curled my lip in open distaste.
     
    "After much discussion, your mother and I have decided that since you cannot be swayed from your desire, you should at least have some means of survival on Edoku beyond mere wit or sweat," he said.
     
    I glanced from him to the ring on my finger, to my mother, and back again, thinking they had both gone mad. "This ring might secure me a glass of wine and a piece of bread in some low taverna, I suppose ..."
     
    Leonardo laughed. "I have crafted the casing to create just this illusion so as to discourage the attention of thieves," he told me. "In