Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“That you did. Now, what’s this about asking me about your bairn? I had none of my own while I lived and there will be none now that I’ve died.”

“But you knew that my baby would be a boy,” Ayradyss protested, “and you knew that the banshee wailed for him—and for me and for John.”

The ghost shook its chain, paced a few steps, glowered at her from beneath bushy brows.

“You’re taking liberties, lass, liberties, indeed. Ghosts and supernatural manifestations are not to be interrogated so. We give omens—interpreting them, that’s another provenance.”

Ayradyss stirred her soup deliberately, ate one spoonful, then another. It was growing cold, the barley gluey. She pushed the mug back into the recess. Looking up into the opaque window, its lead-joined panes all diamonds and angles, she said as if to herself:

“I wonder if the Winter King would tell me what I need to know?

He smiled so when we danced. Perhaps he knows why Death wants my baby.”

There was a solid iron crash behind her as if a chain had been dropped directly onto bare stone.

“That Winter King most certainly knows why Death wants your bairn, lass, but I dinna think that he would tell you straight.”

“Can you?”

“I dinna ken the answer, lass.”

“Can you help me learn it?”

A long silence. Ayradyss watched the nicker of the snowfall behind the heavy glass, seeing more the shadow as it opaqued the light than the actual snowfall itself. The wind howled without and she was glad that the architects had sacrificed historical verisimilitude to insulation.

“Can you help me, Ghost?”

“No more dancing with the Winter King?”

“No more.”

“You’ll stay warm and dry and eat the best food so the bairn grows strong?”

“I will.”

“Aye, then I’ll help you look for the answers, lass. I canna promise that we’ll find them, but I can help you look.”

Ayradyss turned and studied the ghost. He stood bent within his shabby tunic, his breeches sagging. His feet, she noticed, were bare and disfigured with corns. The ankle around which the chain was fastened, oddly, was as smooth as the one without.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Dinna ken,” came the voice, fading as the ghost faded. “Dinna ken. Some things ‘tis better not to know.”

Ayradyss contemplated this for a long moment, then gathered up her mug of cold soup. The sky outside was growing dark. She would pull John from his calculations. They could build a fire in the parlor off their bedroom, dine by candlelight by the hearth. Afterwards, perhaps they could return to the jigsaw puzzle they had been doing—a Monet bridge scene that had them quite baffled.

Humming softly, she descended the stair, not hearing the banshee’s wail intermixed with that of the wind.

John D’Arcy Donnerjack continued his work, incorporating suggested changes. Mornings, when he would return to his studio, he would learn whether his designs had been accepted. Or he would find new lists of specifications. At the end of his work session, when he left his changes and their catalogue on the machine at the customary address, he appended a personal note for the first time: “How serious were you on the firstborn business?”

The following morning at the end of the new listing he found the response: “Totally serious.”

That day, when he completed his work he added a new message: “What would you take instead?”

The next day’s reply was: “I will not bargain over that which is my due.”

He responded: “What about the most comprehensive music library in the world?”

The reply was: “Do not tempt me, Donnerjack.”

“Can we get together and talk about it?” Donnerjack asked.

“No,” came the reply.

“There must be something that you want more.”

“Nothing that you can give me.”

“I’d try to get it for you.”

“Discussion ended.”

Donnerjack returned to his work, executing brilliant design revisions, incorporating the desired changes, suggesting additional ones of his own. Many of these latter were approved.

One day, when he had left the full field interface open to the Great Stage, he heard bagpipe music. He moved to the nearest window and looked outside but could find no clue as to its source. He stepped out into the hallway, but it seemed fainter there.

Returning, he realized that the sounds seemed to be coming from the vicinity of the Stage.

He entered there and was startled. It was as if he had stepped ashore and hiked some miles to the east. He had set the scan on drift, as was his custom, and the landscape which surrounded him now was a replica of the Scottish Highlands. And it was obvious that this was the source of the music.

He waved his hand in one of the key areas and a menu appeared in the air before him. He stabbed the spoked semicircle icon with his forefinger and when its hardened holo manifested he took hold of it, and turning the wheel, pushed in for acceleration and steered in what he took to be the direction of the music.

He bore to the right, and Virtu rushed past him. Hills, hills, hills. The piping was coming from here, but it could take forever to search among those crags and ridges.

He drew back on the wheel, rising higher. But the ranks of hills continued, partially masking each other, and at this altitude the music became harder to distinguish. Why was he so anxious, he asked himself, to track down a local, unimportant phenomenon in Virtu? But something about it called to him, perhaps striking an ancestral chord, making it feel special.

He continued his search, circling, rising. Finally, he was rewarded with the view of a man in a small valley, standing atop a boulder, wearing a set of pipes. He dropped lower, advanced slowly, moving until the man and his stone were in the area of the Great Stage.

He walked forward then and halted a score of paces away, regarding the man’s dapper form and neat beard, the dagger at his ankle, the claymore at his side.

Standing, listening there, he became aware that the terrain was shifting slowly about him, hills sinking into valleys, other hills rising. It struck him then that somehow they obeyed the music. It was as if the area had grown plastic and were dancing to the skirls and wailings, overriding, somehow, the will of its genius loci .

The piping went on, and on, as did the changes. After a time, he noticed a sudden drooping in the midst of a nearby patch of heather. Then a tiny piece of blackness raised itself above it and moved to one nearer at hand. The heather began to fade, to wither.

“Hi,” came a small voice. “Music’s a great thing, isn’t it?”

He stared and saw that the black patch was a butterfly.

“He won’t stop for awhile yet,” it said. “That’s ‘Band of the Titans’ he’s playing. It goes on some.”

“Who is he?” Donnerjack asked.

The butterfly flitted to his shoulder, the better to be heard above the piping.

“Wolfer Martin D’Ambry,” came the reply, “who piped the phantom regiment of Skyga to many victories in the days of Creation. He is a lost soul of sorts, the Phantom Piper.”

“Phantom Piper? Why is he called that?”

“Because he is of no world, and he wanders like a ghost, looking for his lost regiment.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never heard the story.”

“In the early days the realms suddenly pulled upon one another and bled through more easily, when the union of systems produced Virtu at large.”

“Yes.”

“When all was cut loose there was a period of chaos, a great flux, as the aions sought to maintain their domains against the pressures from all sides. A world had been born and sent upon its way, but its unmooring was somewhat catastrophic, though it might not have seemed so on the outside. It may have been a matter of moments there, though it ran for eons within.”