Read Online Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online

then you awake, c'est tout, and this you have braved every night of your life, ne. Up, up, up meine kleine! In a moment, your fears will all dissolve in sleep."
     
    I shuddered. I smiled wanly. I took a long deep breath and within my mind chanted a silent mantra against my fear. Then, step by step, each footfall as portentous as the ringing of some solemn chime of doom, each metal rung sounding a note in a symphony of courage that only I could hear, I ascended the ladder and eased myself into the cubicle as if I were entering my grave.
     
    I lay upon a padded pallet with a spiderwork helmet behind my head. "Sleep well," a voice called out from what seemed like far below.
     
    Then with an all-but-inaudible whine, the cubicle door slid shut and I was alone with a claustrophobic dread that brought a silent scream of terror to my throat which I choked back by a last heroic act of will.
     
    Another hum of hidden machineries, and then a cold metallic caress as if the icy hand of death had been laid upon my skull, and then --
     
    Chapter 4
     
    -- I awoke.
     
    That was the extent of the subjective experience of my first voyage from world to world: I lost consciousness in a state of terror in a sealed cubicle and then awoke from a dreamless sleep into an enormous sense of relief, for the first sight that greeted my eyes was that of the cubicle door already sliding open to release me from my tomb.
     
    Needless to say, I scrambled out of the cubicle and down the ladder without delay, and only when my feet were firmly planted on the deck did my spirit come fully awake and perceive, somehow, that I had truly crossed the void.
     
    There were no physical symptoms to tell me that my life processes had been suspended for some seven weeks, nor did so much as a molecule of the dormodule seem altered, but there was an electricity in the air, an alteration of the music of the spheres, that somehow convinced my skeptical instincts that the Bird of Night now orbited another world. Sleepers were clambering down from the cubicles, floaters appeared bearing our luggage, and a ship's annunciator was chanting a marvelous mantra of anticipation: "Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock ... Passengers departing for Edoku please proceed to the sky ferry dock ..."
     
    There was no need for more detailed instructions, for a stream of passengers was already bustling up the ship's spinal corridor, ordinary folk such as myself carrying packs or accompanied by a floater or two, and what were obviously Honored Passengers surrounded by whole convoys of floaters, and all one had to do was find a clear place in the melee and be borne along by the current.
     
    Soon I found myself seated in one of the sky ferries into which we were all unceremoniously ushered without apparent regard for our previous statuses, and a moment later I was gazing out of the port at my first sight of Edoku.
     
    My mouth fell open. I gasped. It must have taken several minutes for my mind to even begin to form a coherent set of images out of the data impinging upon my retinas, for the sky ferry was already underway before I could even vaguely comprehend what it was moving toward, and even then --
     
    Rather than the starry blackness of space, I beheld an endless curtain of gaseous turmoil, swirls within swirls, whorls within whorls, magenta, orange, brown, red, purple, these seething eddies and whirlpools in turn organized into bandlike higher patterns, and the whole seeming to be frozen in midmotion like a still image abstracted from a holocine.
     
    As the attitude of the sky ferry shifted, the curve of a planet drifted into view from below, and sprinkled liberally above it, hundreds, indeed thousands, of brilliant discs of light from which beams descended, moving, shifting, changing colors, as if a cast of thousands were performing a pavane on an immense stage below, each performer tracked and illumined by a private spotlight.
     
    Then the sky ferry,