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Eagle next week," my mother said to my wide-eyed astonishment.
     
    Leonardo laughed. "We dine at his parents' table often enough," he pointed out. "At the very least, such a matter of cosmic import is suitable table talk among us, ne."
     
    "Davi is three months younger than I am ..."
     
    "Quite so. "
     
    "So ..."
     
    "So ...?"
     
    All at once I found my ire at this foolish game overriding any further reticence between my unease at the import of what I was about to announce and the desire to make my meaning plain. "So it's time I began my wanderjahr too!" I exclaimed with no little pique. "Both of you knew what I wanted to say all along!"
     
    Shasta laughed. "We had a certain inkling surmise," she owned. "But naturellement such a declaration is one we must all make on our own. It's hardly a confession to be prised from uncertain lips like an admission from the guilty conscience of a child."
     
    "I'm not a child!"
     
    "Indeed, kleine Moussa?" my father said, smiling paternally, or so it seemed, to mask a certain sense of loss.
     
    "I'm not your kleine Moussa anymore!" I declared, all at once coming to detest this innocent term of endearment which I had always accepted in the loving spirit with which it was intended. "I've completed my schooling. I've had many lovers. I can power-ski with the best. I can fly an Eagle. I'm conversant with cuisinary styles and vintages. I have survived many a night in the Bittersweet Jungle. I can compose word crystals and play chess. What more is there for me to learn in Nouvelle Orlean before I'm ready to become a Child of Fortune?"
     
    At this my parents burst into such laughter that even I was constrained to hear the foolishness of my own words.
     
    "Voila, our kleine Moussa has become a woman of the worlds, skilled in all the means whereby one may survive as an independent human among indifferent strangers," Leonardo ironically declared.
     
    "So now that you have mastered the rudiments of the tantric arts and hedonic sciences, you consider yourself a sophisticated daughter of Nouvelle Orlean, more than ready to conquer the wider worlds of men?" my mother asked, and though this was said with no little reflexive jocularity, still I could not but perceive its serious intent, nor could I fail to wonder whether in truth I might not be entirely unequipped to survive without parental largesse.
     
    But on the other hand, I told myself as this unpleasant thought passed like a cloud across the bright blue sky of my young spirit, the absence of parental largesse was hardly what I had in mind.
     
    Thus did it finally dawn upon me that the leave to travel as a Child of Fortune was already a foregone grant in my parents' hearts and that without exactly knowing when the transition had occurred, we had now entered into negotiations vis-a-vis the financial arrangements.
     
    In which case it would be better to remain their kleine Moussa a while longer, the little girl whom mother and father would fear to loose upon the seas of fate without the protective might of beau coup d'argent.
     
    "Certainly not to conquer, mama," I said in quite a more childish tone." And no doubt you are right, papa, I've not yet learned the skills required to earn my way as a full independent adult among strangers. But how am I to learn to make my own way among the worlds unless I try? Surely you would not contend that Davi is better equipped for the vie of a Child of Fortune than I?"
     
    Leonardo laughed. "You have me there, Moussa," he said. "But on the other hand, Davi's parents have weighed the freedom of his spirit down with a chip of credit sufficient to finance a life of indolent ease in the floating cultura and the grand hotels of even the most extravagant of worlds for several years."
     
    I liked not the drift of my father's words, I liked them not at all. "Naturellement, papa," I said in a daddy's darling voice I hadn't used in years. "As you yourself have said and I in all humility must agree, I've yet to