Donnerjack Read online

  Donnerjack

  Roger Zelazny

  Jane Lindskold

  In our world, called the Verite, he is a Scottish laird, an engineer, and a master of virtual reality design. In the computer-generated universe of Virtu, created by the crash of the World Net, he is a living legend. Scientist and poet with a warrior’s soul, Donnerjack strides like a giant across the virtual landscape he helped to shape. And now he has bargained with Death himself for the return of love. The Lord of Entropy claimed Ayradyss, Donnerjack’s beloved dark-haired lady of Virtu, with no warning, leaving a hole in the Engineer’s heart. But Death offered to return her to him for a price: a palace of bones… and their first-born child. Since offspring have never before resulted from any union of the two worlds, Donnerjack accepts Death’s conditions—and leads his reborn lover far from the detritus and perpetual twilight of Deep Fields to his ancestral Scottish lands, hoping to build a sanctuary and a self for Ayradyss in the first world.

  But there is no escaping, because cataclysmic change is taking place in Virtu. A bizarre new religion is sweeping through this ever-shifting universe where the homely can be virtually beautiful, the lame can walk and the blind can see. Now it’s threatening to spill over into Verite. And its credo is a call for a different kind of order. For all the ancient myths still occupy Virtu. And the Great Gods on Mt. Meru are amassing great armies in anticipation of the time when a vast computer system attempts to take over the reality that constructed it.

  DONNERJACK

  by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold

  PART ONE

  ONE

  In Deep Fields he dwelled, though his presence extended beyond that place through Virtu. He was, in a highly specialized sense, the Lord of Everything, though others might claim that same title for different reasons. His claim was as valid as any, however, for his dominion was an undeniable fact of existence.

  He moved amid the detritus of all the broken forms which had once functioned in Virtu. They came here, summoned or unsummoned, when the ends of their existence became fact. Of some, he salvaged portions for his own uses. The others settled where they fell and lay… strewn, to continue their decomposition, though some parts of them survived longer than others. Even as he strolled, pieces would rise up, in human form or other, perhaps to strut a few paces, mouth some words, perform a characteristic function of what they had been, then sink again into the dust and rubble of which they were becoming a part. Sometimes—as he did now—he stirred the heaps with his stick to see what reactions this would provoke. If he found some performance or some bit of knowledge, some key or code, of amusement or use, he would bear it away with him to his labyrinthine dwelling. He could assume any form, male or female, go where he would, but he always returned to his black-cloaked, hooded garb over an amazing slimness, flashes of white within the shadows he also wore.

  There was a great silence in Deep Fields much of the time. Other times, discordant sounds rose, seemingly from the dust and rubble itself, squeals of entropy and when they fell away the silence seemed even deeper. His favorite reason for occasionally absenting himself from his realm was to hear patterned sounds—specifically, music. There was no other like him in all of creation. Known by thousands of names and euphemisms, his commonest appellation was Death.

  And so Death walked, swinging his stick, beheading algorithms, pulping identities, cracking windows to other landscapes. Arms twisted upward from the ground as he passed, hands open, fingers flexing and his halo of moire and shadow passed over them and they fell back. Deep Fields was a place of perpetual twilight, yet he cast impenetrable, improbable shadow where he went, as if a piece of absolute night were always with him. Now, another piece of such darkness flapped into existence, black butterfly out of his arbitrary north—perhaps a piece of himself returning from a mission—to dart before him and settle finally upon his extended finger. It closed its wings as he raised it. A moment of cacophony came and went.

  Then, “Intruders to the north,” it said, its voice high, piping, small dots of moire passing like static outward from it.

  “You must have mistaken the activity of a fragment,” Death responded, soft as the darkness, low as the dying rumble of creation.

  The butterfly let fall its wings and raised them again.

  “No,” it said.

  “No one intrudes here,” Death replied.

  “They are rifling heaps, searching…”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Show me.”

  The butterfly rose from his fingertip and skipped off to the north. Death followed to the sound of discord, odd pieces of reality flashing into and out of existence as he passed. The butterfly traveled on and Death mounted the hill, pausing when he had achieved the summit.

  In the valley below two manlike forms—no, one was female—had excavated a trench to considerable depth. Now they were passing along its length, the man holding a light while the other removed things from the ground and cast them into a sack. Death, of course, was aware of much that lay in the area.

  “What desecration is this?” Death inquired, raising his arms, his shadow flowing toward them. “You dare to invade my realm?”

  The one with the sack straightened and the man dropped the light, which went out instantly. A great babble of voices and strident sounds filled the air as if in synchrony with Death’s ire. There came a small golden flicker from within the trench as his shadow reached it.

  Then a gate opened, and the figures passed through it, just before the shadow flooded the trench with blackness.

  The fluttering shape approached the hilltop.

  “A key,” it said. “They had a key.”

  “I do not give out keys to my realm,” Death stated. “I am disturbed. Could you tell where their gate took them?”

  “No,” it replied.

  Death moved his hands to his left, cupped them, opened them as if releasing a wish or an order.

  “Hound, hound, out of the ground,” he muttered, and a heap of bone and metal stirred below in the direction he faced. Mismatched bones reared up, along with springs, straps, and struts, to form themselves together into an ungainly skeletal construct, to which pieces of plastic, metal, flesh, glass, and wood flew or slid, turning like puzzle pieces after unlikely congruencies, fitting themselves into such places, to be drenched suddenly by a rain of green ink and superglue, assailed by a blizzard of furniture covering and shag rug samples, dried by bursts of flame which belched from the ground upon all sides. “There is something that needs to be found,” Death finished.

  The hound sought its master with its red right eye and its green left one, the right an inch higher than the left. It twitched its cable tails and moved forward.

  When it reached the top of the hill it lowered itself to its belly and whined like a leaky air valve. Death extended his left hand and stroked its head lightly. Fearlessness, ruthlessness, relentlessness, the laws and ways of the hunt rose from the ground and rushed to wrap it, along with the aura of dread.

  “Death’s dog, I name you Mizar,” he said. “Come with me now to take a scent.”

  He led him down into the trench where Mizar lowered his head and nosed about.

  “I will send you into the higher lands of Virtu to course the worlds and find those who have been here. If you cannot bring them back you must summon me to them.”

  “How shall I summon you, Death?” Mizar asked.

  “You must howl in a special way. I will teach you. Let me hear your howl.”

  Mizar threw back his head, and the sound of a siren bled into the whistle of a locomotive mixed with the death-wails of a score of accident victims, and, from someplace, the howling of a wolf on a winter’s night, and the baying of hounds
upon a trail. A legion of broken bodies, servomechs, and discarded environments stirred and flashed in the valley below, amid junk mail, core war casualties, worms, and crashed bulletin boards. It all settled again with a clatter when he lowered his head and the silence took hold of Deep Fields once more.

  “Not bad,” Death observed. “Let me teach you to modulate it for a summoning.”

  Immediately, the air was rent by a series of shrieks, wails, and howls which brought a stirring to all of Deep Fields with its pulsing pattern and which resulted in an inundation of new forms, falling, striding, shuffling, sliding into the realm, stirring the dark dust to haze the air through which new cacophonies traveled.

  “That I will hear and recognize wheresoever you shall be,” Death stated, “and I will come to you when so summoned.”

  A patch of blackness landed upon Mizar’s nose, and his lopsided eyes were crossed as he regarded the butterfly.

  “I am Alioth, a messenger,” it told him. “I just wanted to say hello. You have a fine voice.”

  “Hello,” Mizar answered. “Thank you.”

  Alioth darted away.

  “Come with me now,” Death said, and he moved to descend the trench.

  An inky monkey-shape swung round a twisted beam to hang and watch them.

  Entering the trench, Death led Mizar to the place where the two intruders had worked, and whence they had departed.

  “Take their scents,” he said, “that you may follow them anywhere.”

  Mizar lowered his head.

  “I have them,” he said.

  “I will open a series of ports. Do not pass through them. Sniff, rather, at each, and see whether any bear traces of these scents. Tell me if one does.”

  The monkey-shape scuttled, approaching the trench’s side, and crouched there, watching.

  Death raised his right arm, and his cloak hung down to the ground, curtain of absolute blackness, before the hound. Without preliminary lightening, it became a gateway to a bright cityscape built as within a sphere or tube, buildings dependent from all visible surfaces. It was gone in an instant to be replaced by a flashing city of slim towers and improbable minarets, connected by countless bridges and walkways, clouds drifting among them, no sign of ground anywhere.

  Then meadows flashed by, and long corridors of innumerable doorways, both lighted and dark, opened and closed, the interior of an Escher-angled grotto, tube cities beneath a sea, slow-wheeling satellites, a Dyson-sphered realm whose inhabitants sailed from world to world in open vessels. Yet Mizar remained still, watching, sniffing. The pace increased, scenes flashing beneath Death’s arm with a rapidity that no normal eye might follow. Alioth skipped before prospects of live flowers, both mechanical and organic.

  Death halted the process, freezing on the scene of a classical ruin— broken pillars, fallen walls, crashed pediments—upon a grassy and flower-dotted hilltop, flooded with golden light beneath a painfully blue sky. Gulls passed, calling. The shadows were all hard-edged, and a touch of sea-smell drifted through the gate.

  “Anything at all?” Death asked.

  “No,” Mizar replied, as Alioth darted through the gate to settle upon a flower which immediately began to droop.

  “I have tried the likeliest choices for the glimpse I had. We will look somewhere more distant, someplace almost impossibly hard to reach. Bide.”

  The scene vanished, to be replaced by that blackness which had prevailed earlier. A little later, a light appeared. It brightened steadily, casting illumination far down the trench and beyond it. The black, spiderish monkey-form crouched on the trench’s edge drew back as the brightening continued, as coils of colored light and random-seeming geometric forms drifted within to the accompaniment of an electrical sizzling sound. Trails like lightning came and went. Then darkness ensued of an instant, inverting the values of the various brightnesses. A negative quality came over the crackling prospect.

  Mizar stirred.

  “Yes,” he said then, the spikes of his teeth gleaming metallically in the glow. “There is something similar here.”

  “Find them if you can,” Death said. “Call to me if you do.”

  The hound threw back his head and howled. Then he sprang forward through Death’s port into the dark-bright abstract world beyond, sustained by wings of moire. Death lowered his cloak and the gate was folded and put away.

  “You may never see him again,” said the monkey. “It is a very high realm to which you have sent him—perhaps beyond your reach.”

  Death turned his head, showing his teeth.

  “It is true that it could take a long while, Dubhe,” he said. “Yet all patience is but an imitation of my ways, and even in the highest realms I am not unknown.”

  Dubhe sprang to his shoulder and settled there as Death rose up out of the trench.

  “I believe that someone has just begun a game,” Death said as he headed across Deep Fields through a meadow of blackest grass, black poppies swaying at the passage of his cloak, “and, next to music, they have invoked a pastime for which I have the highest regard. It is long, Dubhe, since I have been given a good game. I shall respond to their opening as none might expect, and we will try each others’ patience. Then, one day, they will learn that I am always in the right place at the proper time.”

  “I once felt that way,” the monkey replied, “till a branch I was reaching for wasn’t there.”

  The cacophony that followed might have been their laughter, or only the random bleats of entropy. Same thing.

  * * *

  John D’Arcy Donnerjack loved but once, and when he saw the moire he knew that it was over. He knew other things as well, things he had not even suspected till that moment; and so his heart was torn in more than one direction, and his mind spun down avenues it had never traveled before.

  He looked at Ayradyss, his dark-haired, dark-eyed lady, there beneath the hilltop tree where they always met, and the moire swam over her, granting her features an even more delicate appointment. He had always felt that, had they chosen, they might rendezvous in his world, but that the dream-dust, fairy-tale quality of their romance required the setting of this magic land. Neither of them had ever suggested otherwise. Now he understood, and the pain was like ice in his breast and fire in his head.

  He knew this place far better than most of his kind, and he doubted that Ayradyss was even aware of the first moire flicker which meant her end. He knew her now for a child of Virtu rather than a visitor masked by an exotic name and pleasing form. She was exactly what she appeared to be, beautiful and lost; and he caught her about the shoulders and held her to him.

  “John, what is the matter?” she asked.

  “Too late,” he said. “Too late, my love. If only I had known sooner…”

  “Known what?” she said. “Why are you holding me so tightly?”

  “We never spoke of origins. I did not know that Virtu is really your home.”

  “What of it, John? What differ—”

  And the moire flickered over her again, longer than before; and he could tell by her sudden tensing that this time she had noted it.

  “Yes, hold me,” she said. “What did you mean when you spoke of wishing to have known sooner?”

  “Too late,” he replied. “There might have been something I could have tried. No guarantee it would have worked, though. Probably wouldn’t have.” He kissed her as she began to shake. “Too small a piece of an idea too late. I have loved you. I would that it could be longer.”

  “And I you,” she replied. “There were so many more things to do together.”

  He had hoped that the moire would not return for a long while, as might sometimes be the case, but abruptly it was back again, causing her form and features to flow as if seen through a heat haze. And this time he thought that he heard for a moment a strain of discordant sound. This time the moire remained, and Ayradyss continued to waver through more and more distortions. It became difficult to hold her as her shape was altered, diminishing the w
hile.

  “It is not fair,” he said.

  “It is as it always has been,” she replied, and he thought that he felt a final kiss as she fell and the air was touched again by that sound. A faint track of bright dust lay across the air.

  He stood with empty arms and clouded eyes. After a time, he seated himself on the ground and covered his face with his hands. At some point, his grief gave way to a journey through everything he had learned of Virtu, the race’s greatest artifact, and he brought to bear theories he had developed over the years and all of the speculations with which he had played during his enormously fruitful career.

  When he rose again it was to seek a single mote of her dust and to begin another journey, down hypothetical ways to the end of everything.

  * * *

  Tranto felt it come upon him as he labored with a fractilizing crew, manipulating small proges into a forest, under a new eyedee, there, outside the thatched hamlet he had also helped to raise. An old pain he’d never quite understood was acting up again at the fore-end of his great bulk—a thing that had been with him ever since his encounter with the phant poacher, whom he had left totally disconnected and flat, never to notch his trophy gun again or return to the Verite. Tranto bellowed briefly at the sensation, and the other phants moved away, rolling their eyes and shifting uneasily.

  It would be best to get away from them before the pain pushed him beyond control. His small—and diminishing—area of rationality had never dwelled deeply on the nature of pleasure and pain. For his kind, pleasure was connected with the sensation of processing without any actual work involved—a high-order distillation of that which motivated their mundane, purposeful work-actions. Pain, on the other hand, arose from the introduction of hidden chaos factors into their proges. Long ago, the hunter’s blast had left such a trace, which acted up every now and then, ruining his social life and contributing to local gossip.

  He snorted and stamped. He had labored once—a prisoner—in an encrypted space, a love-nest of a government official of the Verite, whose virtual companion had ruined the packaged ecology with her extravagant insistence on omnipresent bowers of flowers, to the point where the hopefully self-supporting space had overloaded and could no longer serve the second half of its dual function. Part of a crew of shanghaied labor, Tranto recalled the painful Chaos Factor control prods in the hands of Lady May’s overseers—and sometimes those of the lady herself—by which he and the others had been driven to offset the effects of the proges she had skewed. As terrible as the CF prods had been, they were never as massively traumatic as his spells—though they had, finally, served to set one off, the one which resulted in his destruction of much of that place, opening it to the attention which had led to Morris Rintal’s dismissal when it was discovered that diverted government funds had been used in its setting up-up, and to divorce, when his wife in the Verite had learned of his virtual lover.