Their goblets chimed as they touched the rims together.
NINE
Spewing tracks before it, the Brass Babboon surged from the orchard wherein strange attractors grew upon gnarled trees that knew too much of possibility and grumbled portents in the harvesters’ ears.
“Where to, Jay?” the Brass Babboon inquired.
“To Deep Fields!” Jay answered, trying to make his voice bold and certain.
While Tranto and Dubhe had gathered the strange attractors, plucking them with fingers and trunk that had elongated and distorted as they neared the fruit (returning to normal as soon as the fruit was touched), he had studied the control panel for his father’s train. He felt now that he could operate the screens, the slicing scissors, the various launchers with a degree of confidence.
“Any thoughts about the route we should take?” the Brass Babboon asked. “Or do you expect an invitation?”
This last was said so sarcastically that Jay forbore from saying that he believed he had something in the way of a standing invitation. He didn’t think that anything could intimidate the terrible train, but if anything could so, knowing that Death awaited its passenger might be it.
“How did my father get in?”
“He seemed to feel that either the beginning or the end of time would serve equally well as a route. We went in at the beginning of time.” Maniacal laughter punctuated the reflection.
“I wonder if the same route would serve us?”
“The Lord of Entropy has probably taken measures against casual intrusion.” Again the maniacal laughter. “Of course, I am anything but casual.”
“True.”
“The end of time is closer, though,” Tranto commented from where he stood on the flat bed, munching strange attractors.
“It is?” Startled, Jay turned to see if the pliant was joking with him.
“Didn’t you hear what the orchard said? The portents are there. The ones on Mem dream again their vast armies. The Master has been seen, and now the Engineer’s mad machine is in the service of his son.”
The phant’s eyes were dilated wide and his tone was dreamy. Gouts of energy, rainbow-hued yet viscous, coursed along the scars on his wrinkled grey hide. Jay hardly knew what to say to him, so he addressed the Brass Babboon:
“Is the end of time closer?”
“In a matter of speaking. It is less definite than the beginning, but for that reason may serve us better. The ones on Meru do indeed dream and their dreams of beginnings may have made that beginning more aggressive than when J. D. and I pushed through.”
Jay looked at Dubhe. The monkey had forborne from eating the strange attractors and nibbled now on a banana.
“What do I know?” Dubhe said, pitching the peel back to Tranto. “It’s time for you to choose.”
“The end then,” Jay said, and he tugged the whistle.
“Did you bring any music?” the Brass Babboon asked.
“Huh?”
“Your father played recordings when last we made this run. I thought you might have brought some with you. The Lord of the Lost is fond of music and might hold his blows to listen a while.”
Jay realized how little he had prepared for what he was getting into.
“No, I didn’t. Do you have any?”
“What J. D. included in my original design. Shall I play the same selection?”
“Sure.”
And so the Brass Babboon picked up speed to a jazz rendition of “Dixie,” a rendition that became wilder as they surged away from the sites that Jay recognized and into areas wherein the laws of geometry and physics had been curled into themselves to emerge warped, their underlying principles displayed for those who had the wit to comprehend.
Almost, almost, Jay understood what he was seeing and the near realization pressed against the curves and folds of his brain, threatening to unpack them from their convolutions and lay them out as flat and straight as the tracks which the Brass Babboon spat from its laughing mouth.
As the veneer of Virtu frayed, he saw the numbers of the base programs, the World Wide Web of ancient days. A man he recognized as his father stood behind a workbench, his head tilted back so that he could debate with a man dressed in long indigo robes embroidered with mystic symbols who stood on a cloud. As the Brass Babboon carried him by, Jay realized that the man on the cloud was Reese Jordan.
Between cloud and workshop drifted a third man hanging from a parachute, chuckling as he fiddled with the controls of something he wore girded around his waist. His merriment was a marked contrast to the seriousness of the other two men.
But these things were caught in glimpses as the fall of moire began. First it was a drift of dark flakes, ashes from a chimney. The drift became a flurry, then a swirl of bats that warped the landscape over which they passed. Proges shattered beneath their shadowy advent and upon their broken parts the moire bent and feasted.
“Turn on the screens, Jay!” Dubhe screeched in his ear.
Tearing himself away from the hypnotic vista of rapid decay, Jay realized that the monkey had been shouting at him for some time now. He leaned forward and snapped on the correct switch. A violet aura encased the cab and then flowed back to cloak the flatbed on which Mizar and Tranto rode.
“Sorry, Dubhe.”
The monkey chewed on the end of his tail. The moire fall had grown so thick now that only glimpses of the underlying program could be seen through the dual distortion of screens and moire.
“We need light,” Jay said.
He hit the button labeled “Flares” and brilliant violet light burst forth. The Brass Babboon screeched into the increasingly formless swirl. Beneath the violet of the screens, the landscape had become the sick, dizzy white of a color wheel spun so rapidly that all colors blend into one.
Wildly excited, Mizar howled and Tranto trumpeted. At tremendous volume, the Brass Babboon chortled something as obscene as it was incomprehensible. Suspecting that the noise would help anchor them into something like solidity as they bore on through, Jay reached up for the whistle and pulled it long and hard. “Dixie” had given way to the “Wolverine Blues.” Dubhe swung from his tail and used all four paws to conduct the unsanctified orchestration of sound that carried them through the end of time and into the detritus-strewn vastness of Deep Fields.
Only one thing loomed over the broken plains: a dark, many-towered shape.
Craft the fairy-tale palace of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria from nightmare and ecru marble, then hack it apart with a chainsaw and reassemble it with indifferent attention to form and order. This is something like the recipe for the Palace of Bones as designed by John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Senior.
Jay approved and took some comfort in this evidence of his father’s genius.
“J-D. had me crash through the walls,” the Brass Babboon screamed. “Want me to do that again?”
“No!” Jay replied. “Approach the palace at as high a speed as you can, divert at the last possible moment, and then loop around the palace. Are you long enough to enclose it?”
“I can be,” the Brass Babboon answered.
“Then be so. When you halt, we will fire a barrage of strange attractors over the palace in the fashion of a fireworks salute. If Tranto hasn’t eaten too many, we should have enough and to spare.”
The phant belched in a dignified fashion.
“I only consumed a few, and I find that my repast has completed healing the damage given to me.”
Jay glanced back at the phant. Tranto’s hide still rippled with the odd gouts of power, but he had to admit that the last traces of weakness were gone from the phant’s bearing. He had no desire to consider further, for the Brass Babboon was shrieking into a turn, beginning the course that would loop them around Death’s palace.
“Whaa-whoo!” Jay shouted, glorying in the speed and the excitement. “Yeah!”
Dubhe, still hanging from the cab’s ceiling by his tail, shook his head, but clearly he felt something of Jay’s joyful ex
citement in this defiant confrontation with everything a sane entity should avoid.
“Can I launch the fireworks, Jay?”
“You bet. Just wait until B.B. comes to a full halt. I want to shoot over the towers—a salute, not an attack.”
“Right!”
Even as the Brass Babboon squealed to a stop, its impertinent grin a few inches from its improbable caboose, Dubhe fired the salute.
Perhaps because Jay wished them to do so, the strange attractors shot upward in phosphorescent white streaks. These collided, then exploded in a sunburst: first gold, then green, then iridescent blue dimming into silver, showering among the marble towers, clinging to the gargoyles and has relief flutings on columns and porticos for a single glorious moment.
When the last of the silver sparkles faded, Death rode forth from the main gate of his palace.
His steed was crafted of things salvaged from his realm and was calculated to impress and intimidate, even as Mizar had been created to search and destroy. There was about it something of a dragon, something of a horse, and something of an eagle. Its colors were azure and ebony stolen from the day and night skies of vanished virt realms.
As the steed pranced out of the vaulted gates carrying the slim, robed figure of Death, Jay D’Arcy Donnerjack craved it as he had never before craved any created thing.
Phecda twined around the steed’s head, halter and herald both, and when Death had drawn alongside the Brass Babboon’s cab, she raised her viper’s head and hissed greeting.
“So, at last you come to Deep Fields, Jay Donnerjack. Know that you are welcome here.”
“Thank you, Phecda,” Jay replied. He bowed to the Lord of Entropy. “And thank you, sir.”
Death grinned, white within the darkness of his cowl.
“You come as your father twice came to me. What do you wish to claim from me?”
“Nothing.”
“You cannot have me believe that you made this trip for pleasure.”
“The scenery was a wonder like nothing I could have imagined, but no, sir, I did not make the journey for pleasure.”
“Yet you want nothing from me. I am intrigued. Tell me why you have come.”
Jay straightened his father’s striped cap on his head. His heart pounded in his chest and his joints felt loose and weak. The inside of his mouth flooded with saliva and as quickly went dry. He realized he was terrified, but he did his best to hide his fear.
“I learned of a bargain made between you and my father, sir. The more I thought about it, the more I came to feel that you had been wronged.”
“I have been.” Death’s voice cracked on the final word.
“And I have come to… to ask you what purpose you had for me when you demanded me from my father.”
“You said you wanted nothing from me, but you ask for an explanation.”
“Perhaps I should have said that I wanted nothing material.” Jay placed his hand on the cab’s door latch, “Before I surrender myself, I will admit that I am curious what you intend for me.”
“Before?” The glint of white within the cowl might have been a smile, but it could as easily been the fixed rictus of a bare skull. “So you intend to surrender?”
“In some circumstances, surrender is more honorable than being taken captive. I believe that this is one. If my father had left behind a debt of money or service, I would have tried to pay it. I’ll admit that I don’t particularly like the terms of this debt, but I think it should be honored nonetheless.”
Death laughed, a sound that made Tranto flap his ears and Mizar whine in involuntary protest.
“You speak fair, Jay Donnerjack, even though your voice does quaver. What would you do if I told you that all I required of you was a source of spare parts for some project I am involved with?”
Jay recalled Reese Jordan’s conjecture on that very point, but he remained steady.
“I would beg your leave to say farewell to Dack, since he has been the only parent I have known, then I would turn myself over to you. If you would not permit me to leave, I would ask at least permission to send him a message.”
“And if I told you that I required the traitor who even now swings alongside you in the cab of the Brass Babboon?”
“I would be able to do nothing, sir. I cannot dispose of my friends’ lives.”
“Thanks, Jay,” Dubhe whispered.
“Even if I required them?”
“No, sir. I think you pulled a mean trick on Dubhe and the rest when you set them to be spies on me.”
“Perhaps I merely meant to protect you.”
“I’d thought of that, but you shouldn’t have left them not knowing what your intentions were.”
“Ah, we are back to my intentions, are we? Very well. I have no desire to break you up for spare parts. I have bits and pieces to spare here in Deep Fields. Indeed, spare parts are all that I possess. I desire you alive and functioning. Had your father surrendered you to me as I had intended, you would have been educated here. I gave in to his whim, and so you are perhaps less well-trained for the task I need done than you might have been.”
“Task?”
“This is not the place to speak of such things. Come forth, if truly you mean to surrender. We will confer in my palace.”
“And Dubhe?”
“He has allied himself with you. You choose to serve me. Therefore, he is indirectly in my service once more. I can settle for that. The same goes for Mizar and any others you have brought with you.”
Jay opened the cab and leaned upon the door. The silence of Deep Fields weighed on him, muting even the chuff of the Brass Babboon’s stack and the noise as Mizar and Tranto came to join him.
“Shall I wait for you, Jay?” the Brass Babboon asked.
“There is no need,” Death interjected. “When he leaves here, it will be in a less obvious fashion.”
“Then I’ll lay tracks out of here. Leave a message for me at any of my stations, Jay, and I’ll come as fast as I can.”
Jay patted the grinning face. “Thanks, B.B. I’ll remember that.”
With a wail that rippled the ruined proges into a Danse Macabre, the Brass Babboon departed. To those watching, he simply seemed to enter the middle distance, dimmish, and recede until the eye could no longer fix on his point.
“Come,” Death said, his steed turning.
Jay let Tranto lift him onto his back. With Mizar at his side and Dubhe on his shoulder, he obeyed. An up-swelling of cacophony rippled through the still air. It was impossible to tell if the sound was mockery or applause.
* * *
In a site modeled after an early twenty-first century nightclub, two men sat at a table that floated two meters in the air, tilted at a thirty-degree angle. The original nightclub would have required elaborate constructions involving plexiglass and nearly invisible cable to achieve this effect. In Virtu, of course, none of this was necessary.
“Tickets went on sale today at all Virtik locations,” commented Skyga.
For this manifestation he wore his hair long and the pale blue of a cold day. His brows were upswept cumulus and his features stern but benign. Privately, he considered his virtual savoir faire an example to his associate who was, as ever, deplorably slovenly.
“And sales are going well,” said the Hierophant of the Church of Elish.
Today his tee-shirt (sweat-stained at the underarms) read “Marduk is a Pisser” and showed the great and terrible conqueror of Tiamat raining down on a crowd of upturned faces. It was a bit too tight and had crept up to create a gap above his baggy shorts through which his hairy beer belly protruded. The Hierophant knew that his casual attire drove Skyga crazy and did his best to make certain that the one from Highest Meru always had something to annoy him.
“We should be able to generate ample mana to sustain the crossover,” Skyga continued.
“That’s the idea, bud. How are your troops doing?”
“Morale is good. I have made allies among many of the genü
loci— some are even assisting in training and coordination. Others are merely providing guarded sites so that I can conceal the extent of my strength.”
“Do you really expect any resistance once the show is on the road?”
“Seaga will not approve, for the success of this venture will forever confirm me as the foremost of the Highest Three. It is difficult to know how Earthma will react.”
“I thought you said that she’d been helpful.”
“She has. That’s what worries me.”
The Hierophant gestured and a long-necked beer bottle appeared in his hand. He removed the cap with a bottle opener built into the underside of the table. It rattled to the floor.
“Want one?” the Hierophant said, after he had taken a long drink and belched approvingly. “Tastes real good.”
“No, thank you,” Skyga said stiffly.
“It’s good, as good as anything Verite has to offer—or so I’ve been assured.”
“You seem content enough with the limitations of Virtu,” Skyga said. He tried to keep his query polite, knowing that he still needed this ally’s cooperation. “Why did you approach me with the concept of the Church of Elish if you did not believe in the need for the reestablishment of the divine to its proper place in the Verite?”
“You were the one who saw the potential for permanent crossover,” the Hierophant reminded him. “I just wanted to start a religion and I thought your help recruiting a few godlets would be a good thing.”
“Yes, but why did you wish to start a religion? Certainly you do not feel that humans need to know the truth about Virtu?”
The aion who had once been known as A. I. Aisles, the first aion comedian, chuckled, drained his beer, and blew a note like the bellowing of a cow for her calf across the neck.
“Truth? Well, sure I think they need to know.”
“You do?”
“Sure.” A. I. Aisles laughed until his belly shook. “Most of them don’t believe it—not really, not deep down inside. Not even when we give ‘em miracles and virt powers. They’re just playing the game.”
“I still fail to understand why you would wish to encourage this.”
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