Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“Have fun, Jay,” he called.

“I will. See you in a couple of days.”

Dack finally let him board the cruiser. “I will take care of Dubhe for you. Be careful.”

Jay muttered further reassurances until he was in his seat and the door sealed shut. He pressed his head against the window and waved until the castle, then all the island called Eilean a’Tempull Dubh, was swallowed in the mist. Then he leaned back against the headrest and tried not to show too much of his excitement. He was out—out in the Verite—on his own.

He glanced at the bracelet. Well, almost. Remembering his manners, he turned to the driver.

“I’m Jay Donnerjack. Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Think nothing of it. I’m Milburn. I work for the Donnerjack Institute. It is a pleasure to meet our founder’s grandson.”

“Grandson? I always thought that my dad founded the Institute.”

“No, it was your grandfather. He made quite a lot of money in medical research and established the Institute to promote various research foundations and to take care of his family. Your father’s work considerably added to the Institute’s fortunes, however.”

Jay stared down into the white cloud mountains over which Milburn guided the cruiser. It did not occur to him to be amazed by the vista, for he had seen far stranger in Virtu. As of yet, he had not meditated on the role of chaos in shaping Verite.

“I wonder if I will ever do anything to add to the Institute’s fortunes,” he said after a time.

“You wonder at this?” Milburn asked. “Your heritage would seem to make it a certainty.”

“But what can I do? I live locked up in that castle. I don’t do anything, really, except roam around Virtu. What good am I?”

“You are educated?”

“I guess so. Lots of math, literature, some languages. Is that any good?”

“More than, sir. Many people cannot do even those things. Virtu is the ultimate tool for creating an unlettered proletariat. Many service tasks that once took great skill are now performed in virt space in a simplified fashion for which computer programs provide the details.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A simplified example: Once a human clerk needed to know how to type and file. Today correspondence is dictated to a virt assistant—a computer proge—that then creates the document, edits it for spelling and grammar, perhaps flags any infelicities, and returns it for approval before sending it on. Filing is so automatic as to hardly merit a separate name. When a document is no longer needed, it is immediately filed or erased. The human does not even need to know how to recall it—the virt assistant handles that.”

“So?”

“So once being a clerk or secretary was a skilled job. Now it is handled via virt.”

“That frees more people to get better educations, right? And to do things like colonize the solar system or advance human knowledge.”

“Only in theory, sir. There are many humans who, through lack of intelligence or temperament, simply cannot profit from higher education or more elaborate training. Now that they are unemployed, they are either forced into what labor is not already done by artificial people or onto public support. Neither is satisfactory.”

“Somehow you seem like the last type of person I would expect to be lamenting technological unemployment.”

“Because I am an android? I am complex enough to lament waste, Master Donnerjack.”

“Jay,’ please.”

“Jay, then. I see lives left without direction. No one starves or goes without minimal health care. Since they do not need to struggle to survive, all the energy of these basically intelligent people must go into something. I mention this because you are going to a celebration held by the Church of Elish. Many of their followers are drawn from the ranks of those who have no place in the Verite. Uneducated, they are captivated by the promises of the Church, the vague hints of higher knowledge.”

“I wondered how so many of the people I met at services had time to learn all the arcane rituals. I could barely fit the basics into my study program, and Dack was willing to let me include them into my curriculum as theology and anthropology.”

“Many have nothing more important to do than worship modern interpretations of ancient gods, Jay.”

“Have you been to the Church?”

“Only once. They do not actively encourage APs.”

“That’s odd. The stories are that the religion was founded by an AI.”

“There is a social separation between our kinds. Since we have greater mobility—effectively dwell within the Verite—many aions dislike us. Yet, despite our greater physical mobility, we are more limited than almost any virt aion since our systems cannot carry memory to match that of the aions. Some of the greater aions have commented that even a sophisticated AP is little better than a proge.”

“That seems rather snobby.”

“So, we are the inbetweens. Neither AI (though what else are we other than artificial intelligences?) nor human, and somewhat scorned by the majority of both groups.”

“Oh. I never knew.”

“I was touched by your kindness to Dack—your consideration for his concern for you even though he was being a dreadful nag—or I would have never mentioned such things to you. Somehow, I did not think you would be one to scorn a person, no matter the origin of intelligence.”

“Thanks.”

“Dack did have a point about jet lag. It can really mess up organics. If you want to sleep, it might be a good idea.”

“I’m too excited, but I’ll try closing my eyes.”

Jay did so, leaning back his chair and thinking. Already, hardly out of home, he had learned something about Verite he would not have found in his studies. Ignorance of the issue had kept him from reading what commentaries might be available, but in any case, people rarely wrote about prejudices until they had begun to be addressed as detrimental. He wondered what Angus and the Duncan said about the robots when they returned home to the village. Did they resent them for doing jobs that, in the past, would have been given to human members of the castle’s fiefdom? It was an unsettling thought.

After a time, he drifted off to sleep, excitement, last-minute packing, and a celebratory drink with the crusader ghost having kept him awake far later than was his wont. When he awoke, Milburn was coming into a landing pattern over New York City.

“The crowd mills below, replacing Central Park’s green spaces with the swirling colors of summer dresses, shorts, and bright shirts. Mylar balloons in the shapes of winged lions, winged bulls, and ziggurats bob over the throng, their strings clutched by hands still sticky from the free ice cream provided by the Church of Elish. Towering over all of this is the great ziggurat that will be the focus of today’s celebration…”

Desmond Drum sighed. “Do you really need to do this? You know that every major newsfeed will have reporters and photographers here.”

Link huffed. “I want to record my own impressions, in my own style.”

The grin that quirked at the corner of Drum’s mouth was comment enough on Link’s pretensions to style, but the reporter turned his back on him and continued his muttered narration.

“The great ziggurat that will be the focus of today’s celebration should be dwarfed by the skyscrapers that tower clifflike over the park’s green oasis…”

“I thought you said it wasn’t green.”

“Shut up… green oasis, but something of the ancient grandeur of the lost culture of Ancient Babylon clings to even this modern recreation.”

Link clicked off his recorder. For today’s adventure he was clad in khaki trousers, a loose short-sleeved button-down shirt over a dark tee-shirt, leather loafers, and a jaunty fedora with a “Press” card stuck in the brim. Except for his anachronistic wrist recorder, he was the archetype of the questing reporter: Clark Kent, Woodward and Bernstein, and, of course, Lincoln Steffens.