Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

Donnerjack grinned back. “Soon, soon, prince of puppets,” he responded.

He finished loading his gear and climbed aboard. Donning an engineer’s cap, he drew back on the switch and blew the whistle.

“Let’s go,” lie said.

The Babboon shrieked and began to move forward. The next time Donnerjack blew the whistle, it was mingled with a maniacal laugh.

“Where to, J. D.?” it asked.

“The beginning of time or the end of time,” he replied. “Either will do, and I opt for the former. The first time I entered Deep Fields through a backdoor design flaw which has since been removed. I don’t think anything can stop us on this approach, though.”

“Whatever you say, boss. Uh, how do we get there?”

“We have to find the Road and lay a bed beside it, all the way back to Creation. Then we make a little detour.”

The Brass Babboon accelerated. With every chug it spewed more track across the landscape and rode it, faster, faster. Donnerjack began to hum, then he switched on his sound system. It blared out “Dixie.”

The Brass Babboon leaped ahead. It tore up mountainsides, bridged streams, crossed Cloud Canyon. Sometimes storms raged about it; at others, stars twinkled in a clear sky overhead. Virginia Tallent saw it pass. Sayjak paused in the act of castrating an enemy boss to listen to its whistle as it passed the jungle’s fringe. “Pretty,” he observed. His companion shrieked an unintelligible response. When it was crossing the veldt, Tranto saw it, heard it, and trumpeted back a reply to its whistle. It whistled again. He responded again.

Faster and faster, till finally the Road. Road, Road…

Soon they ran beside it, great thoroughfare through landscape after landscape, travelers moving along it by many means. Only gradually did the Road narrow, finally becoming dirt, finally deserted.

The Brass Babboon spewed tracks, and a great light slowly came into being before them. Donnerjack threw up screens as the prospect brightened and brightened. Soon a feeling reached him, as if the atmosphere were vibrating. Then the ground began to tremble.

Volcanos blew on either hand. The landscape went topsy-turvy.

“Faster!” Donnerjack said.

The Babboon moved like a bullet through a region of suspended mountains. The mountains were sucked into the sky and the ground flipped again. Seas drained back and forth, into the sky and down, forming bright archways. A faint, almost echoing boom filled the air.

“Get ready,” Donnerjack said. “When I tell you, begin firing strange attractors before us and bear to the right!”

Moments later, “Now!” he shouted.

The world went to hell about them. They drove through a region of pure light—blinding despite the filters. They were buffeted as if by enormous wings, and Donnerjack felt the forces of Creation fast at his back.

“Attractors to the rear!” Donnerjack cried.

The blast went on and on and on, seeming to push them to even greater velocities.

“Downhill now! Down! Down!” he cried, almost before there was such a thing as down.

Within the low, booming sound it almost seemed that he could hear Warren Bansa’s voice saying, “Shit!”

He hurled more strange attractors to the rear and plunged on through the light.

Gradually, the background boom subsided and forms began to drift, dreamily, eerily, before him.

“Hard left!” he called out.

“Aye, aye, J. D.”

They chugged along and the horizon occurred.

“Keep bearing left.”

After a time they came to a stand of hills, a hole piercing the side of the largest.

“Enter the cave.”

“Looks like a tight fit, J. D.”

“Slow down, then.”

The engine lost velocity as it approached the cave.

“I think we’re all right. Need the lights, though.”

They moved slowly as they proceeded downward. Bright veins of metal flowed through the walls about them. Occasionally, something glassy gleamed.

Donnerjack blew the whistle. The way finally grew level, and the walls widened a little. They wound along for some while before they encountered an upward slope. The cave narrowed, widened again, continued widening.

Again the whistle blared.

“A little farther now,” said Donnerjack.

The way steepened and the Brass Babboon accelerated against the grade. Far ahead, an archway became faintly visible.

“That could be it, J. D.”

“I think you’re right. We want to come out fast, with the whistle blaring.”

“You got it.”

The Babboon jumped ahead, the archway grew but did not brighten. The grade began to level. Donnerjack began a steady blasting of the whistle and set “Dixie” for a replay.

They burst into the twilit world where clouds of detritus drifted, occasionally to rain particulate matter upon the land. Heaps of trash disintegrated before their eyes, revealing dark meadows, bogs, fens, and forests. They passed along the shore of a great dark sea of shifting, powdery sands or dust. A black orb hung in the heavens. Occasional bones protruded from the ground.

“Where to now, boss?”

“I don’t know where he is. Just keep going as we are. I think he’ll notice.”

After a time, he detected a faint, bruiselike glow ahead and to the left.

The Babboon veered and blasted on. The light grew slightly until Donnerjack topped a hill and beheld the valley below him.

“Halt!” he cried, regarding the prospect. Below, oddly tinted flames leapt from fissures in the ground. Amid them, strange beings toiled. Not human, not machine, they seemed to be assembled of anything that lay at hand—legs of metal, skeletal torso, discarded radio for a head, or otherwise. The laborers were of cable, metal, wire, and bone. They probably clanked and rattled, Donnerjack reflected, though he could not hear them from his hilltop.

Of the pastiche laborers—disintegrating where they fell, to have their places taken by the fresh-risen—some were engaged in moving massive slabs of stone while others worked to rear a huge iron gate rust-etched with the postures of the Danse Macabre.

“My palace,” Donnerjack remarked, “is already being built. Interesting. Crash it.”

“Sir … ?”

“Lay track, build up a good head of steam, blow the whistle, and start down the hillside. When you come to the palace keep going, right through it. Then halt.”

He fiddled with the controls of a small black box on his left.

“Go!”

The Brass Babboon began to move, and a wave of static electricity caused Donnerjack’s hair to rise and fall.

“Battle mode!” Donnerjack said.

None of the workers looked up as they approached, though the Babboon bloomed flames at its sides and blew them from mouth and rear. When they hit what stood of the front wall, a quarter of it went down and was tracked over. Donnerjack’s hair rose again as they passed through the center of the palace and this time it did not fall.

Coming clear at the far end of the edifice, Donnerjack cried, “Turn! We’ll do it again if we must! And again—”

The ground erupted before him, building a fiery tower where they had been about to lay tracks. The air brakes screamed and the wheels smoked as the Babboon screeched to a halt.

Death stood atop the blazing mound of earth, hands hidden in his black sleeves. The slope before him grew steps, and he escalated down into the full glare of the Babboon’s headlamp. Above the engine’s chugging, his voice somehow came clear:

“Who dares to invade my realm?”

“John D’Arcy Donnerjack,” came the reply.

“I might have known. How did you get here?”

“By the Gate of Creation.”

“Amazing. You are a truly dangerous man, Donnerjack.”

“I want her back.”