Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

Wolfer Martin D’Ambry nodded. “I understand despair, Alice. If I can help…”

“I’ll call.”

Jay Donnerjack was getting drunk with the crusader ghost in the upper gallery of Castle Donnerjack when Alice arrived. He raised his glass and toasted her, but standing seemed beyond him. The ghost was in little better shape.

“Hi, Alice. I have a story for you.” Jay’s words were slurred. “Do you know that for the first time in centuries Castle Donnerjack doesn’t have a wailing woman?”

“It doesn’t?” Alice sank down on the floor next to him.

“Nope. My mom took the job and then Seaga swiped her and she got wiped fighting ol’ Alioth. I loved Alioth, y’know. That flutterby was my buddy when I was jus’ a squirt with no parents and nobody. Weird that my mom killed my bud or my bud killed my mom.”

“Yeah.”

“I hear that you did the crossover like a pro. Dubhe tol’ me. Now you got a mom and a dad. I don’t got either.”

“Poor Jay.”

“Yeah,” he sniffled. “Poor me.”

“Poor Jay. He has millions, a castle in Scotland with ghosts, an Institute at his command, and freedom of both Virtu and Verite. Poor, ol’ Jay Donnerjack.”

“Poor ol’…” He stopped, glared at her through bleary eyes. “Are you laughing at me, Alice Hazzard? How dare you!”

“Ever since Dack called me, all frantic, I’ve been feeling really sorry for you, Jay. Then when Milburn picked me up to bring me here, I had the whole flight to think. You did lose a lot, but lots of what you lost you never had.”

“Huh?”

“Your parents. They both died when you were tiny. Most orphans don’t get the second chance you did.”

“Aye,” the crusader ghost agreed. “The bonny lass is right.”

“Shut up!”

“And Reese, that hurt, I’m sure, but most people don’t get to have nearly immortal teachers. Reese was dying before you or I were born. He’s gone now—or is he? I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Tranto.”

“You asked Tranto?”

“Sure. Didn’t you know that he and Death hit it off really well? He visits Deep Fields so that they can build rubble constructs.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No, you’ve been sulking.”

Jay blinked at her. “I have.”

“And you’ve had good reason to, but are you ready to quit now? Dack’s a mess.”

“Poor Dack.”

“And Mizar—unlike Dubhe, he can’t come across to visit you.”

“Oh.”

Jay stared at his fingernails.

“I feel like a jerk.”

“Healthy—unless you start moping about that next.”

He punched her. She grinned.

“They say there’s truth in the vine, Alice, so I’m going to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Did you get the feeling that we were supposed to fall in love with each other?”

She blushed. “Well, yeah.”

“And that didn’t work, either.”

“Probably a good thing, too. I wouldn’t like suspecting that my loving made me a pawn in someone’s game.” She leaned and kissed him lightly on one cheek. “Anyhow, who’s to say what will happen? We’re only kids yet.”

Jay turned red. The crusader ghost laughed.

High atop Mount Meru at the center of the universe the gods sat unmoving on their stone thrones, contemplating Virtu all about them. In the past, they had sacrificed much of mobility for the better part of omniscience. Now they spared just a bit of mobility to watch their backs.

Celerity, he who had been Ben Kwinan, had borne to them a message. Written in blood red on parchment of bone-white, it had been brief and to the point:

“Now I have freedom of Mem. Do not forget.”

They did not need to see the signature, a fanciful sigil like unto a skull, to know who sent it.

“Arrogant,” said Seaga.

“Obnoxious,” agreed Skyga.

“But, sadly, true.” Earthma sighed. “It was a good game while it lasted. I, for one, shall rest long before I play again.”

She ceased speaking and closed her eyes, humming softly to herself.

Seaga lowered his voice to the faintest of whispers.

“Skyga, do you believe her?”

Skyga frowned a firmament-darkening frown.

“Her?”

High atop Mount Meru, two gods contemplated a third.

In Deep Fields he dwelled, Lord of Everything, although anything that he made tended to fall into pieces. The great silence of Deep Fields was interrupted only by Sibelius’s Symphony Number 2, Opus 43 emanating from the player hanging from a wind-blasted logic tree against which he leaned and the grunts of Tranto as he shoved rubble into a mighty mountain.

“It’s looking good, lord,” the phant called. “Mind, we’ll need some strange attractors to glue it together.”

“Those can be acquired, Tranto.”

Phecda, coiled around his slender white wrist, spoke, “What will it be, lord? When it is done?”

“Why, nothing, for nothing that I make holds together.”

But as he spoke, he contemplated a seed of emerald green, the size and shape of a peach pit. Power glowed golden within its surface convolutions.

“It will be nothing at all, Phecda.”

Death laughed then and moved to join Tranto.

Chaos, Chaos,

(oh my sweet youth, sweet girl, angel of despair, lovers friends, and other toys)… Chaos, Chaos,

is satisfied.