Donnerjack

by Roger Zelazny

  “Very well. I will see you gentlemen around, though you will probably not see me.”

  Dack dealt with them on small matters such as wages and equipment, then saw them to the door and out, with a pleasant, “Good morning, gentlemen,” thus beginning a long and rewarding relationship for all parties concerned.

  * * *

  The following night Donnerjack was awakened sometime during the small hours by the sound of a banshee wail. Quietly, he rose, donning robe and slippers, and went to investigate. It seemed to be coming from the third floor, west wing. As he moved in that direction, the wailing seemed to increase in volume.

  “A howl isn’t enough!” he cried. “I want the full message! What’s coming?”

  The howling ceased and a dark form fluttered by him.

  “God damn it!” he cried. “Don’t you ever stop and chat?”

  “‘Tis not in the nature of their kind,” came a croaking voice from the left.

  Casting his gaze in that direction, Donnerjack saw a wavering, glowing outline and heard a gentle rattling of chains.

  “Ghost! Can you help me?” he asked. “Do you understand what the wailing is all about?”

  “I think you’ve been diverted, mlaird,” it replied. “I’d say to go back—immediately.”

  “Why?”

  “It is unseemly, sir,” it said, “to question supernatural manifestations as you do,” and it winked out.

  “Shit!” Donnerjack stated, and he turned and hurried back.

  He entered the master bedroom. Nothing seemed to have changed. Could the ghost have meant for him to check the nursery? He placed his hand on Ayradyss’s shoulder, pressing gently.

  “Darling,” he said. “We’ve had another of those ghostly visita—”

  Her skin felt cold and as he shook her he realized that it was not living flesh that he nudged.

  “Damn you, Death!” he screamed. “God damn you!”

  He raised her, drew her to him, embraced her.

  He held her for a long while and his eyes grew moist. Then, slowly, he lowered her.

  “You have cheated me, Death,” he said softly. “You gave her back long enough to bear the child you wanted. Then you snatch her away again. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  Then he stood.

  “I keep my bargains, too,” he said.

  Turning, he rose and crossed to the cradle that rested near to Ayra’s hand so that she might nurse the baby without needing to rise. The baby slept deeply and well, unaware of his loss.

  Gingerly, Donnerjack raised the child in his arms and bore him with him to his study/workshop. There he deposited him in a portable crib he had recently installed in the place. Soon he was performing electronic measurements on his sleeping son’s body and brain. He did not yet have everything that he wanted in the way of information, but this might do for now.

  He seated himself then at his design module, and he began to fashion a tiny bracelet that would hold his work. When the design was finished and checked, he fed it into a fabricator. While the bracelet was being made, he reviewed the deadly code for something else as he waited.

  The baby sniffed a few times and he passed it a pacifier. A little later he realized that only a bottle of formula would do. He called for Dack to bring one and continued his work.

  Perhaps five minutes later Dack appeared with the beverage. “It is in a nippled bottle,” he explained. “You did want it for the baby, did you not?”

  “Yes,” said Donnerjack, “though now I see it I wouldn’t mind something cold for myself. A grape juice would be nice.”

  Immediately, on Back’s departure, Donnerjack lowered his head to his arms and sobbed once. When the robot returned later, he was working again.

  “Thank you, Dack,” he said. “Please cancel all of my appointments for the next week. I won’t be taking any calls during that time either— with a small list of exceptions which I will furnish shortly.”

  “Yes, sir. It will be done.”

  “…And stay out of the master bedroom for now.”

  “As you would, sir.”

  John D’Arcy Donnerjack located the ideal area just outside the south wall, shielded from the sun. He had the robots fence it as they constructed her coffin. He laid her to rest there, holding his infant son in his arms as the robots did the burying. Their hair stood on end, for the black box was strapped beneath his jacket and the new bracelet on his son’s tiny wrist. He did not notify any authorities of her death, for they had no record of her life, lady of Virtu.

  * * *

  In neither reality had there ever been such a machine as the Brass Babboon. Donnerjack assembled it carefully in Virtu—a great, sleek, long, low engine with a peculiar caboose, it shone like sunlight on the China Sea before a typhoon, had a whistle like the final shriek of a damned soul, and spouted fireworks rather than smoke and cinders. It cannibalized realities, broke the bounds of virtual domains, and tore like a meteor through anything, spewing gleaming tracks before it as it went, leaving a horde of irate genü loci to adjust to its passage. It was faced with the visage of a great grinning baboon. It was designed to be virtually unstoppable as well as intimidating.

  Donnerjack calculated an existence theorem that worked out the necessary coordinates for the hidden valley where strange attractors grew on trees, proceeded to this point, then distributed many of these in a variety of ways in both the engine and caboose.

  As he passed before the chugging engine’s cab, the baboon face blew a smoke ring, grinned more widely, and said, “Ready whenever you are, J. D.”

  Donnerjack grinned back. “Soon, soon, prince of puppets,” he responded.

  He finished loading his gear and climbed aboard. Donning an engineer’s cap, he drew back on the switch and blew the whistle.

  “Let’s go,” lie said.

  The Babboon shrieked and began to move forward. The next time Donnerjack blew the whistle, it was mingled with a maniacal laugh.

  “Where to, J. D.?” it asked.

  “The beginning of time or the end of time,” he replied. “Either will do, and I opt for the former. The first time I entered Deep Fields through a backdoor design flaw which has since been removed. I don’t think anything can stop us on this approach, though.”

  “Whatever you say, boss. Uh, how do we get there?”

  “We have to find the Road and lay a bed beside it, all the way back to Creation. Then we make a little detour.”

  The Brass Babboon accelerated. With every chug it spewed more track across the landscape and rode it, faster, faster. Donnerjack began to hum, then he switched on his sound system. It blared out “Dixie.”

  The Brass Babboon leaped ahead. It tore up mountainsides, bridged streams, crossed Cloud Canyon. Sometimes storms raged about it; at others, stars twinkled in a clear sky overhead. Virginia Tallent saw it pass. Sayjak paused in the act of castrating an enemy boss to listen to its whistle as it passed the jungle’s fringe. “Pretty,” he observed. His companion shrieked an unintelligible response. When it was crossing the veldt, Tranto saw it, heard it, and trumpeted back a reply to its whistle. It whistled again. He responded again.

  Faster and faster, till finally the Road. Road, Road…

  Soon they ran beside it, great thoroughfare through landscape after landscape, travelers moving along it by many means. Only gradually did the Road narrow, finally becoming dirt, finally deserted.

  The Brass Babboon spewed tracks, and a great light slowly came into being before them. Donnerjack threw up screens as the prospect brightened and brightened. Soon a feeling reached him, as if the atmosphere were vibrating. Then the ground began to tremble.

  Volcanos blew on either hand. The landscape went topsy-turvy.

  “Faster!” Donnerjack said.

  The Babboon moved like a bullet through a region of suspended mountains. The mountains were sucked into the sky and the ground flipped again. Seas drained back and forth, into the sky and down, forming bright archways. A faint, almost echoing
boom filled the air.

  “Get ready,” Donnerjack said. “When I tell you, begin firing strange attractors before us and bear to the right!”

  Moments later, “Now!” he shouted.

  The world went to hell about them. They drove through a region of pure light—blinding despite the filters. They were buffeted as if by enormous wings, and Donnerjack felt the forces of Creation fast at his back.

  “Attractors to the rear!” Donnerjack cried.

  The blast went on and on and on, seeming to push them to even greater velocities.

  “Downhill now! Down! Down!” he cried, almost before there was such a thing as down.

  Within the low, booming sound it almost seemed that he could hear Warren Bansa’s voice saying, “Shit!”

  He hurled more strange attractors to the rear and plunged on through the light.

  Gradually, the background boom subsided and forms began to drift, dreamily, eerily, before him.

  “Hard left!” he called out.

  “Aye, aye, J. D.”

  They chugged along and the horizon occurred.

  “Keep bearing left.”

  After a time they came to a stand of hills, a hole piercing the side of the largest.

  “Enter the cave.”

  “Looks like a tight fit, J. D.”

  “Slow down, then.”

  The engine lost velocity as it approached the cave.

  “I think we’re all right. Need the lights, though.”

  They moved slowly as they proceeded downward. Bright veins of metal flowed through the walls about them. Occasionally, something glassy gleamed.

  Donnerjack blew the whistle. The way finally grew level, and the walls widened a little. They wound along for some while before they encountered an upward slope. The cave narrowed, widened again, continued widening.

  Again the whistle blared.

  “A little farther now,” said Donnerjack.

  The way steepened and the Brass Babboon accelerated against the grade. Far ahead, an archway became faintly visible.

  “That could be it, J. D.”

  “I think you’re right. We want to come out fast, with the whistle blaring.”

  “You got it.”

  The Babboon jumped ahead, the archway grew but did not brighten. The grade began to level. Donnerjack began a steady blasting of the whistle and set “Dixie” for a replay.

  They burst into the twilit world where clouds of detritus drifted, occasionally to rain particulate matter upon the land. Heaps of trash disintegrated before their eyes, revealing dark meadows, bogs, fens, and forests. They passed along the shore of a great dark sea of shifting, powdery sands or dust. A black orb hung in the heavens. Occasional bones protruded from the ground.

  “Where to now, boss?”

  “I don’t know where he is. Just keep going as we are. I think he’ll notice.”

  After a time, he detected a faint, bruiselike glow ahead and to the left.

  The Babboon veered and blasted on. The light grew slightly until Donnerjack topped a hill and beheld the valley below him.

  “Halt!” he cried, regarding the prospect. Below, oddly tinted flames leapt from fissures in the ground. Amid them, strange beings toiled. Not human, not machine, they seemed to be assembled of anything that lay at hand—legs of metal, skeletal torso, discarded radio for a head, or otherwise. The laborers were of cable, metal, wire, and bone. They probably clanked and rattled, Donnerjack reflected, though he could not hear them from his hilltop.

  Of the pastiche laborers—disintegrating where they fell, to have their places taken by the fresh-risen—some were engaged in moving massive slabs of stone while others worked to rear a huge iron gate rust-etched with the postures of the Danse Macabre.

  “My palace,” Donnerjack remarked, “is already being built. Interesting. Crash it.”

  “Sir …?”

  “Lay track, build up a good head of steam, blow the whistle, and start down the hillside. When you come to the palace keep going, right through it. Then halt.”

  He fiddled with the controls of a small black box on his left.

  “Go!”

  The Brass Babboon began to move, and a wave of static electricity caused Donnerjack’s hair to rise and fall.

  “Battle mode!” Donnerjack said.

  None of the workers looked up as they approached, though the Babboon bloomed flames at its sides and blew them from mouth and rear. When they hit what stood of the front wall, a quarter of it went down and was tracked over. Donnerjack’s hair rose again as they passed through the center of the palace and this time it did not fall.

  Coming clear at the far end of the edifice, Donnerjack cried, “Turn! We’ll do it again if we must! And again—”

  The ground erupted before him, building a fiery tower where they had been about to lay tracks. The air brakes screamed and the wheels smoked as the Babboon screeched to a halt.

  Death stood atop the blazing mound of earth, hands hidden in his black sleeves. The slope before him grew steps, and he escalated down into the full glare of the Babboon’s headlamp. Above the engine’s chugging, his voice somehow came clear:

  “Who dares to invade my realm?”

  “John D’Arcy Donnerjack,” came the reply.

  “I might have known. How did you get here?”

  “By the Gate of Creation.”

  “Amazing. You are a truly dangerous man, Donnerjack.”

  “I want her back.”

  “I already gave you your wish. There were no guarantees as to duration. Her time was overdue.”

  “You let her live just long enough to bear the child you wanted. I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “The universe is not a fair place, Donnerjack. I cannot release her again. Would you wish to join her? It may not be as bad as you think, over in my Elysian Fields where certain things are preserved. Some concessions involving pleasantries can even be made for those I favor.”

  “And my son?”

  “He is mine by fair trade. Have you forgotten so quickly?”

  “No, but could you make me some concessions here and now, rather than later?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Let him live long enough to know what life is all about before you take him.”

  “Life is tribulation. Life is disappointment. It would be better for him if I claimed him now and raised him here.”

  “Life is only bad in parts, and you need that to appreciate the good parts—the feeling of a balmy wind on a summer day, watching a garden grow that you have planted yourself, the joy of discovery—be it scientific or otherwise—the taste of a good meal, a good wine, the friendship of one’s fellows, love. It may all be love in one form or another.”

  “Love is the biggest delusion of all, invented to hold back the fears of the darkness which surrounds you.”

  “I pity you. Love is why I dare stand before you.”

  “Pity is a worthless commodity, Donnerjack. I do not need any.”

  “Nevertheless, if you do not need the boy immediately, could you grant him a life before you claim him?”

  “He could become a demon factor in both worlds if I were to permit him to achieve maturity.”

  “And you don’t believe in taking chances?”

  Death chuckled.

  “I don’t believe in making promises.”

  “A small assurance might suffice.”

  “I never give anything away.”

  “And you never take chances. How boring your existence must be.”

  “I did not say that I never take chances.”

  “Then take one now.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ll fight you for his life.”

  Death chuckled again.

  “You seem to forget that I cannot be destroyed,” he said after a time. “If you were to disassemble everything of me that you see before you, yet would the forces of the universe bring back together their overseer of entropy—somewhere, so
mehow—and I would return. I am necessary to the proper functioning of things. My existence cannot be erased. You, on the other hand, are quite mortal. It would be a no-win contest for you.”

  “I know. So I was hoping that you might grant me a handicap.”

  “That being?”

  “If I give you a good enough fight you consider it a draw and consider my petition.”

  “This is awkward. You ask a measure of honor from me, who am considered to have none.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you mean to say that if I feel I have won though you are still standing, your life is forfeit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Intriguing. Indeed.” He paused, then, “Very well, I agree,” he said, and suddenly he vanished.

  “Scan like you’ve never scanned before,” said Donnerjack to the Babboon.

  But Donnerjack saw him first. Death suddenly stood beside the cab, rising, reaching toward the window.

  “The flames, boss?”

  “No. Do nothing. This is a test.”

  Abruptly, Death drew his hand back, studied the window. He reached again and withdrew.

  “I must know how you are doing that, Donnerjack,” said Death. “It is very dangerous.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Given time, I’ll slip through.”

  “In the meantime, you can’t,” said Donnerjack, and he lobbed two strange attractors at him.

  Death fell, and when Donnerjack peered out the window he was no longer in sight.

  Suddenly, he stood before them again. He withdrew his hands from his sleeves. Lights danced at his fingertips, forming into balls that sped toward the cab, exploding as they neared.

  “What now?”

  “It is a distraction. Do nothing. We’re going to live. I know that now.”

  Donnerjack blew the whistle long and hard.

  The firestorm continued, and at length Donnerjack said, “Snap the blades.”

  Like a pair of scissors, a pair of long blades swung forward from the engine’s sides, closing with a snap upon the figure of Death.

  Death fell in two parts as the firestorm ceased.

  “Breathe your flames upon him now, and start lobbing strange attractors at him.”

  Death’s two parts began to smolder, dwindle.

  “More strange attractors. They seem to be affecting him.”