Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“Ab’nana, ah! Mama! Ab’nana! ‘Nana!” The tone was querulous, the words understandable only to a patiently loving ear, and the request immediately granted.

“Very well, have some banana. Try not to get it all over yourself, monkey-face.”

Lydia Hazzard said this last with a great deal of affection, if not with a great deal of hope. She looked up from her reader, watching absently to see how much of the banana the baby actually got into her mouth.

“Not bad, monkey-face,” she said, mopping up bits of squashed banana from chubby fingers, round cheeks, and flaxen hair. “How did you manage to get banana into your hair?”

“Ah-ba-ba, ma-ma-ma.” The baby waved her fists in the air, chortling happily.

“More banana?”

“Pfftt…”

“Here, crawl around in your playpen and terrorize your toys so Mama can study for class. All right?”

“Up!” Said very distinctly and followed by a wail. At times like this Lydia wondered why she had waited so excitedly for the baby to start talking. It was like acquiring a drill sergeant—all that the baby seemed to know were orders and insults. But then she smiled…

Lydia reached into the playpen and hefted Alice into her lap. Becoming a mother at eighteen hadn’t been precisely in her plans, but she was intoxicated by little Alice as she had been by only one other person in her life—Alice’s father, Wolfer Martin D’Ambry.

The doctors attending her confinement (she had come out of Virtu just as the contractions grew regular) had been amazed that she had woken from her coma with a full awareness of her condition. They had expected to meet with shock, horror, disbelief—anything but her calm acceptance that she was having a baby. Her knowledge of Lamaze techniques had astonished them equally, but with Carla insisting that Lydia be permitted to have her baby any damn way she wanted to thank you and hadn’t the doctors and authorities at the facility messed things up enough, where did they get the gall to try and take charge—Lydia had been alert to see her daughter into the world.

Holding her to her breast, she had named her Alice, just as she and Ambry had decided during those long evenings in their cottage on the rocky shore in Virtu. She had feigned exhaustion (actually, it wasn’t much of a feint) to avoid having to discuss what exactly had happened during the ten months or so that they had lost her signal. When she awoke, her parents had taken her and Alice home, refused all calls, and were adjusting rather well to having not only their daughter returned but a granddaughter as well.

The official decision was that Alice was parthenogenetically conceived, the initial trigger being a psychosomatic conversion of Lydia’s “romantic” involvement in Virtu. Lydia knew otherwise. The baby was as much Wolfer Martin D’Ambry’s as she was Lydia’s, even if the DNA was identical to Lydia’s. She saw no reason to argue about it, however, as she had sworn to tell no one—not even her parents—about her virtual husband.

The Hazzards’ fortune, influence, and the threat of a considerable lawsuit against the virtual vacation outfit that had “lost” Lydia for those ten months kept publicity about Alice’s unusual birth to a minimum. Family friends were permitted to assume that Lydia had been impregnated in a more conventional fashion and any busybody interested in scandal found little material.

Only Lydia knew how much she missed Wolfer Martin D’Ambry. He had told her that he could not visit her in Verite, but that when she returned to Virtu he would find her. However, although she had been attending classes in a virtual campus for almost two terms now and had gone away on a virtual weekend with her friend, Gwen, and her younger sister, Cindy, she had not seen him, nor had there been any messages. For now, she was content to wait and hope.

But a year is a long time to wait, especially when you are just nineteen. Although Lydia tried hard to believe that Ambry would find her again, her ability to hope was worn very thin.

As young Donnerjack grew in size and mobility, the only thing that puzzled Dack was that occasionally the boy came back with a leaf or a stick in his hand. He had no idea where they came from, for he knew there was no way of breaking the physical boundary between the worlds. At first, he did not think much about it, being able to rationalize answers on each occasion. Later, though, considering that Donnerjack had been one of the great authorities on Virtu and that much of his final work had been secret, he wondered whether the man might have developed some limited direct access to Virtu via the Great Stage.

Nightmare visions plagued him then. He knew that Donnerjack had wanted his son to play on the Stage. But if he could break the interface and wander off into Virtu, the Stage meantime undergoing several phase shifts, the boy could become hopelessly lost in that other world. It was a terrible dilemma. And, of course, the boy had not done so…

Dack resolved to keep him under surveillance for a time. Beginning the next day, therefore, he joined him on the Stage, staying as far away from him as he could while still keeping him in sight. Dack stood or crouched stock-still most of the time, and when he had to move it was always with great deliberation.

The boy hummed little snatches of song as he toddled or crawled from place to place. Some of these Dack recognized, others he did not. After a time, a mainly rocky scene shifted to a meadowlike one and young Donnerjack made his way into it, offstage.

Moving like a silver and bronze ghost, Dack followed, able to take his time as the boy wandered back and forth and occasionally paused for long stretches to watch a flower, bird, or some crawling denizen of the place.

Dack drew nearer, then grew immobile again. The boy began humming, then singing:

Butterfly, butterfly. Flutterby, flutterby. Come to me, come to me. I’m lonely todee.

He sang it over and over, and after a time the large black insect seemed to emerge from a hole in a nearby tree. It stitched the air in young Donnerjack’s direction, darting about his head almost playfully. Finally, it settled on a nearby twig and seemed to regard him through jewel-like eyes.

“Hi, Al—Ali—” the boy addressed it.

“Alioth,” a small voice corrected him, and Back immediately adjusted his hearing to accommodate it.

“Alioth,” the boy repeated. “Pretty flutterby!”

There followed the tiniest of laughs, then, “Thank you, John. You know how to make an old butterfly feel good.”

The boy laughed himself then. He was not sure why, but Alioth had indicated that something was funny.

“People did not always laugh at the black butterfly,” the insect stated. “Not in the dawn days when my wings filled half the heavens and there was a sound like thunder when I flapped them.”

“Why?” the boy asked.

“I was a mount of the gods in the great civil wars in the days of formation.”

The boy looked confused, his infant vocabulary, precocious as it was at times, struggling with a concept for which he lacked words.

“But you’re little!” The boy moved his hands as if to grasp and squash the apparently fragile butterfly.

“I wouldn’t advise trying that. No, the wars were over and the world had settled into its course of becoming the way that it is. I limited myself and looked for friends and congenial surroundings. When I found them I retired. Virtu no longer had need of its giant thunderbug. It is more fun consorting with flowers than destroying citadels, anyway.”

“What is Virtu?”

“The other half of the world. You are visiting it at the moment.”

“Why?”

“‘Why what?”