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learn the skills required to earn my own way on distant worlds far away from home. Fear not, papa, though I must often seem a creature of foolish and overweening pride, I am not such a monster of ego that I will out of any exaggerated sense of my own economic puissance refuse funds sufficient to travel in a safe and proper style and ease thereby your fears for my survival."
     
    Mother giggled. Father frowned. "Nobly spoken, my kleine Moussa," he said dryly. "But rest assured, we will not allow any foolish fears of ours to rob you of the wanderjahr's true essence, as Davi's tremulous parents have robbed him. Not for our daughter the empty ersatz wanderjahr of a haut turista playing at being a Child of Fortune!"
     
    "The wanderjahr's true essence ...?"
     
    "Indeed," Shasta said. "We will grant you the vrai wanderjahr, the vie of the true Child of Fortune that we ourselves have known, without selfish regard for our own misgivings."
     
    "'The vrai wanderjahr? The vie of the true Child of Fortune?" Somehow I was beginning to suspect that the magnanimity of these professions was something other than what it seemed.
     
    "Just so!" Leonardo enthused. "We cannot allow you to throw away your wanderjahr as a subsidized haut turista out of your tender regard for us. For what is there for the spirit to learn indolently voyaging in the floating cultura, and flitting weightlessly from world to world insulated and pampered inside a voidbubble of parental gelt except sloth and ennui?"
     
    "Verdad!" Shasta agreed. "Instead we grant you the freedom to live the life of the true Child of Fortune, which is to say, surviving by your wits and your own travail, earning your own passage from planet to planet by sweat or guile, entering intimately thereby into the life of every planet you touch, rather than skimming along the gelt-paved surface. For you, mi Moussa, the true adventure of the spirit, the wanderjahr as it was meant to be, the vie of the Child of Fortune, with all its dangers, hardships, and fairly won delights!"
     
    My mouth fell open. My stomach dropped in gross dismay. My gorge, not to say my ire, began to rise. "you ... you would have me starve? You would have me wander the streets of some far-off city on an entirely hostile world without the chip to rent a room in which to sleep? You would leave me to wear the same clothes for years? You would allow me to expire of hunger or exposure scores of light-years from home? You would see your own daughter reduced to begging in alien streets for scraps of bread?"
     
    "Fear not, kleine Moussa," my father said. "Our hearts are not quite so hard as that. Before you rage, hear the traveling gifts we propose. First, we will purchase your passage in electrocoma to any world you choose. Second, we will give you a chip of credit good for similar passage back to Glade from any world of men, so that if hunger or privation pushes you to the brink, you can always return safely home. Finally, we will give you a second chip sufficient to subsidize two standard months' sojourn in decent ease if not luxury on a planet of mean galactic cost of living."
     
    I sprang to my feet shouting, overturning a wineglass in the process. "Merde! Caga! What minge! Electrocoma passage! A mere two months' funds! What have I done to deserve this outrage? How can you do this to your own daughter?"
     
    "With wisdom and a higher regard for the development of your spirit than for your indolent ease," my mother said loftily.
     
    "Pah!" I spat. "With a higher regard for hoarding your treasure than for your own flesh and blood, you mean!" I spread my arms as if to enfold their luxurious manse, their lucrative boutiques, all the fine furnishings and works of art within, the boats moored at our dock, the fulsome hoard of credit behind the chips they carried. "Is this house any less grand than Davi's? Are your chips backed by any less credit than his parents possess? Yet they have given him a chip backed by sufficient credit