Child of Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the First Starfaring Age.
     
    But when the development of the Jump Drive reduced the duration of interstellar voyages from decades and generations to weeks, the wanderjahr reemerged again as the rite de passage of youth into maturity.
     
    Naturellement, in our Second Starfaring Age, the Children of Fortune wander not afoot from town to town nor across the continents and seas of a single planet, but throughout the far-flung worlds of men, in the timeless sleep of the dormodules of the Void Ships, or as Honored Passengers in the floating cultura if parental fortune permits.
     
    For the Children of Fortune of our age do not flee from home in rebellious defiance of parents and body politic; rather do they depart with the blessings, not to say necessary largesse, of same, since those who bid bon voyage have themselves lived out their wanderjahr's tales before choosing their freenoms in homage to the adults they have become.
     
    To learn this sociohistorical lore as a young student in the academy is an abstraction of the mind, but the moment when you realize that the time has come to set your own feet upon the wanderjahr's path is a satori of the spirit, which can be neither arbitrarily determined by the passage of time nor forced upon the spirit from without.
     
    Nevertheless, the decision is almost always made between the sixteenth and nineteenth year of life, and it cannot be denied that society plows and fertilizes the ground in which this flowering of the young spirit blooms. For it is the policy of society to ease off serious studies after the sixteenth year, and it is the endless idle summer resulting therefrom which teaches the lesson that this child's dream of perfect paradise is not the ultima Thule of the human spirit, that the time must come when of our own free will we must move on.
     
    My first dim perception of this last lesson that we are taught, which is also the first we learn on our own, came as a certain sense of pique, a petulant feeling of betrayal as, one by one, the older members of my circle of friends and lovers first announced their intent to leave our garden of juvenile delights and then departed for other worlds. When those whose faces were no longer to been seen among us were a year and more my senior, the lofty airs and moues of condescension with which they said good-bye could be laid to the arrogance of peers who suddenly conceived themselves to be older and wiser beings than their comrades of the week before.
     
    But when at last some who left began to be no more mature in years than I, when I began to see myself as no longer quite the precocious femme fatale sought after by older boys and instead found myself forever repulsing the unwanted attentions of what I perceived as callower and callower youth, my unease by slow degrees began to focus less and less on the decaying social life without and more and more on the growing mal d'esprit within.
     
    As the esthetics of karma would have it, the moment when this spiritual malaise crystallized itself into satoric resolve came with the clarity and definition of a classic koan.
     
    I was lying in my garden playhouse boudoir with Davi, a boy some several months my junior to whom I had begun to grant my puissant favors not three weeks before, more out of ennui and a sense of charity than any grand passion.
     
    As we lay in each other's arms during what I then supposed to be a brief recumbent interlude between the acts, I could sense him becoming somewhat distant, withdrawing into himself. At length, he prised himself from my embrace and sat some small but significant distance apart from me on the cushioned floor, eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, as if nerving himself up to inform me of a rival for his affections.
     
    "Que pasa?" I asked, with no more than a careful petulance of tone, for on the one hand my primacy in his affections was a matter to which all save my pride was indifferent, and on the other, this would obviously best be served