Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“That’s right,” Jay said. “If I buy it here, that’s it.”

“True, but you’re also the only one of us who is really a Veritean at this moment. The rest of us are wearing virt forms—despite his unusual history, Dubhe is at baseline a proge.”

“True,” Dubhe said, “repaired and enhanced by the Lord of Deep Fields, but essentially a proge.”

“So I go up alone?” Jay said.

“That’s right,” Drum answered. “Scout. Go in if you can and fulfill your quest. If you can’t do it alone, then come for us. At the least, we’ll have more information.”

“And the rest of you?”

“We’ll lie low, be ready to help, learn what we can that might help us to find Wolfer Martin D’Ambry.”

Jay considered. “As much as it scares me to admit it, your plan makes sense. I’ll do it.”

“I’ve taken a look at the layout,” Virginia said. Her tone was flat, although she was evidently struggling to seem normal. “If you can climb down from the slopes above and behind the factory, you’ll avoid any guard or wards set for the front approach.”

“Climbing is something I’m very good at,” Jay said with a fond glance at Dubhe. “I’ve had a good teacher in Virtu and gone all over Castle Donnerjack.”

“Do it then,” Virginia said. “Given the setup, the back is probably less heavily guarded. They’d count on terrain to do the job. Of course, all bets are off if the structure is a genius loci .”

“Right,” Jay said. “I’ll remember that.”

He looked at his comrades, suddenly a bit awkward, eager to be away and eager to have an excuse to stay. Since when was he so full of contradictory emotions?

“I guess I’ll be off now.”

Drum shook his hand. Virginia nodded, retired already into her private world of pain and loss now that her talents were not immediately needed. Blushing lightly pink, Alice Hazzard kissed him on the cheek.

“Good luck, Jay.”

Dubhe gave one of his wicked chuckles. “And don’t grab any rotten branches, Jay.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

Then he turned, walked into the brush, and was gone.

“But, Carla, I really think we should go. Think about it—gods on Earth! How often do you think such a thing will happen?”

“Quite frequently, dear, if the Church of Elish is to be believed. This California Celebration is being heralded as the mark of a new era.”

“Still, Carla, I’m going to purchase tickets both for us and for Cindy. You can stay home if you want. I fancy I’ll be able to scalp your ticket.”

“Abel, you’ll do no such thing. The Elshies have quite a way of handling people who cross them and they’ve already made it perfectly clear that scalpers will be handled severely. I, at least, take their threats seriously. Look at what they did to that poor anthropologist. He’s still in hiding, they say. Personally, I think they’ve killed him.”

“Then you’ll come?”

“I’ve made no promises.”

“Thank you, dear. I wonder if I should get tickets for Lydia and Alice? I think the girl has some interest in the Elishites.”

“Surely not in joining them!”

“Oh, no. She was doing some research—a report for school, I think. I saw Arthur Eden’s book on her reader one time when I was visiting.”

“Well, if it would be educational…”

“Then you will come!”

“Oh, Abel, you are such a child! Of course, I’ll come if it means that much to you.”

“We’ll bring a picnic and make a day of it. It should be lovely.”

“Better bring umbrellas, too. Remember what happened in Central Park.”

“Good point…”

Mizar ran across the realms of Virtu, directing his way down, always down, for Deep Fields lies beneath the areas that others frequent, although, paradoxically, it is tangential to any and all but a very few.

His course took him through a spectral gothic landscape where the

genius loci withdrew from him, knowing his maker and respecting that final power.

A black butterfly detached itself from a bough of a lightning-struck apple tree. The lightning bolt had severed the tree in twain—one side continued quick and green, covered with flowers. The other was silver, grey, and shriveled. Where Alioth’s wings flapped, blossoms speckled, cracked, and turned to dust.

“You run far and fast, Mizar,” Alioth piped.

“Message… for the lord.”

“Bad news, I’d wager.”

Mizar did not spare the energy to reply.

“Yes, bad news. Many things are changing in Virtu. For the first time since the wars of Creation I have felt the pull of Skyga’s call.”

Mizar ran on. He crossed from the gothic into the fringes of a marvelous seascape. Here the waters were clear and turquoise blue. Beneath them he could glimpse slim, angular fish, and large, impossible shells. The shore sparkled with crushed obsidian, ground-glass sand catching the sunlight and giving it back in minute fragments so that Mizar ran on a facsimile of the night sky, the blue of day at his right shoulder.

“I could be great again,” Alioth continued wistfully. “Great and terrible—a mount for gods and a weapon.”

“A… slave,” Mizar panted.

“Yet, are we not all so? You run to warn one master, follow on the heels of a boy. A clever lad, talented and with great potential, but a boy nonetheless. You could rip him in two with the barest motion, yet you let him order you about.”

“Killing is… easy.”

The landscape had become one of soft golden dunes. Burrs and thorns were crushed under Mizar’s feet. None had yet been imagined that could penetrate the steel and plastic of his pads. Twisting cacti scuttled out of his way as he ran. His sweat left green ink dots in the sand.

“Killing is easy, you say? You were not there in the battles of the earliest days when the ones from Highest Meru recreated their fallen with the merest twitch of thought. In such instances, killing means obliterating memory, or conversely, creating a new memory of an object—a memory so forceful that it overwrites the original conception.”

Mizar ignored the butterfly’s words. His route was sinking into the outer limits of Deep Fields. He leapt fallen skyscrapers and ran through lengths of broken pipeline.

“I’ll be going, now, Mizar,” Alioth called. “Give my best to the Lord of the Lost.”

Mizar merely ran.

Jay D’Arcy Donnerjack left his companions and moved silently through the shadowed scrub. Although on the outside the thicket had looked soft enough, now that he had penetrated beyond the long-needled pine and trailing willow of the fringes, he could see that appearances were deceptive. Briar thorn, dark green stems almost silky, thorns curved and purple, blocked out much of the light. Cholla cactus, curving canes studded with clusters of inch-long stickers and lush magenta flowers, twisted like vegetable contortionists. Wild roses swarmed over the lot, their delicate five-petaled white or pink flowers at odds with the stinging kitten claws of their thorns.

Moving around the larger clumps, carefully lifting aside a tendril or cane, Jay worked his way through the thicket. His many games of hide-and-seek with Dubhe and Phecda had trained him well. Although his progress was slow, he won his way to the demicanyon in which the factory was set with myriad scrapes and scratches but no major wounds.

Climbing down the steep cliffside, his only dangers the omnipresent threat of falling or discovery, seemed easy and relatively painless. He imagined that something watched him from the few blank windows at the back of the building, but nothing moved, nothing attacked, and he stilled his pounding heart and continued the descent.