Roger Zelazny - Donnerjack

“The Lord of Entropy has probably taken measures against casual intrusion.” Again the maniacal laughter. “Of course, I am anything but casual.”

“True.”

“The end of time is closer, though,” Tranto commented from where he stood on the flat bed, munching strange attractors.

“It is?” Startled, Jay turned to see if the pliant was joking with him.

“Didn’t you hear what the orchard said? The portents are there. The ones on Mem dream again their vast armies. The Master has been seen, and now the Engineer’s mad machine is in the service of his son.”

The phant’s eyes were dilated wide and his tone was dreamy. Gouts of energy, rainbow-hued yet viscous, coursed along the scars on his wrinkled grey hide. Jay hardly knew what to say to him, so he addressed the Brass Babboon:

“Is the end of time closer?”

“In a matter of speaking. It is less definite than the beginning, but for that reason may serve us better. The ones on Meru do indeed dream and their dreams of beginnings may have made that beginning more aggressive than when J. D. and I pushed through.”

Jay looked at Dubhe. The monkey had forborne from eating the strange attractors and nibbled now on a banana.

“What do I know?” Dubhe said, pitching the peel back to Tranto. “It’s time for you to choose.”

“The end then,” Jay said, and he tugged the whistle.

“Did you bring any music?” the Brass Babboon asked.

“Huh?”

“Your father played recordings when last we made this run. I thought you might have brought some with you. The Lord of the Lost is fond of music and might hold his blows to listen a while.”

Jay realized how little he had prepared for what he was getting into.

“No, I didn’t. Do you have any?”

“What J. D. included in my original design. Shall I play the same selection?”

“Sure.”

And so the Brass Babboon picked up speed to a jazz rendition of “Dixie,” a rendition that became wilder as they surged away from the sites that Jay recognized and into areas wherein the laws of geometry and physics had been curled into themselves to emerge warped, their underlying principles displayed for those who had the wit to comprehend.

Almost, almost, Jay understood what he was seeing and the near realization pressed against the curves and folds of his brain, threatening to unpack them from their convolutions and lay them out as flat and straight as the tracks which the Brass Babboon spat from its laughing mouth.

As the veneer of Virtu frayed, he saw the numbers of the base programs, the World Wide Web of ancient days. A man he recognized as his father stood behind a workbench, his head tilted back so that he could debate with a man dressed in long indigo robes embroidered with mystic symbols who stood on a cloud. As the Brass Babboon carried him by, Jay realized that the man on the cloud was Reese Jordan.

Between cloud and workshop drifted a third man hanging from a parachute, chuckling as he fiddled with the controls of something he wore girded around his waist. His merriment was a marked contrast to the seriousness of the other two men.

But these things were caught in glimpses as the fall of moire began. First it was a drift of dark flakes, ashes from a chimney. The drift became a flurry, then a swirl of bats that warped the landscape over which they passed. Proges shattered beneath their shadowy advent and upon their broken parts the moire bent and feasted.

“Turn on the screens, Jay!” Dubhe screeched in his ear.

Tearing himself away from the hypnotic vista of rapid decay, Jay realized that the monkey had been shouting at him for some time now. He leaned forward and snapped on the correct switch. A violet aura encased the cab and then flowed back to cloak the flatbed on which Mizar and Tranto rode.

“Sorry, Dubhe.”

The monkey chewed on the end of his tail. The moire fall had grown so thick now that only glimpses of the underlying program could be seen through the dual distortion of screens and moire.

“We need light,” Jay said.

He hit the button labeled “Flares” and brilliant violet light burst forth. The Brass Babboon screeched into the increasingly formless swirl. Beneath the violet of the screens, the landscape had become the sick, dizzy white of a color wheel spun so rapidly that all colors blend into one.

Wildly excited, Mizar howled and Tranto trumpeted. At tremendous volume, the Brass Babboon chortled something as obscene as it was incomprehensible. Suspecting that the noise would help anchor them into something like solidity as they bore on through, Jay reached up for the whistle and pulled it long and hard. “Dixie” had given way to the “Wolverine Blues.” Dubhe swung from his tail and used all four paws to conduct the unsanctified orchestration of sound that carried them through the end of time and into the detritus-strewn vastness of Deep Fields.

Only one thing loomed over the broken plains: a dark, many-towered shape.

Craft the fairy-tale palace of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria from nightmare and ecru marble, then hack it apart with a chainsaw and reassemble it with indifferent attention to form and order. This is something like the recipe for the Palace of Bones as designed by John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Senior.

Jay approved and took some comfort in this evidence of his father’s genius.

“J-D. had me crash through the walls,” the Brass Babboon screamed. “Want me to do that again?”

“No!” Jay replied. “Approach the palace at as high a speed as you can, divert at the last possible moment, and then loop around the palace. Are you long enough to enclose it?”

“I can be,” the Brass Babboon answered.

“Then be so. When you halt, we will fire a barrage of strange attractors over the palace in the fashion of a fireworks salute. If Tranto hasn’t eaten too many, we should have enough and to spare.”

The phant belched in a dignified fashion.

“I only consumed a few, and I find that my repast has completed healing the damage given to me.”

Jay glanced back at the phant. Tranto’s hide still rippled with the odd gouts of power, but he had to admit that the last traces of weakness were gone from the phant’s bearing. He had no desire to consider further, for the Brass Babboon was shrieking into a turn, beginning the course that would loop them around Death’s palace.

“Whaa-whoo!” Jay shouted, glorying in the speed and the excitement. “Yeah!”

Dubhe, still hanging from the cab’s ceiling by his tail, shook his head, but clearly he felt something of Jay’s joyful excitement in this defiant confrontation with everything a sane entity should avoid.

“Can I launch the fireworks, Jay?”

“You bet. Just wait until B.B. comes to a full halt. I want to shoot over the towers—a salute, not an attack.”

“Right!”

Even as the Brass Babboon squealed to a stop, its impertinent grin a few inches from its improbable caboose, Dubhe fired the salute.

Perhaps because Jay wished them to do so, the strange attractors shot upward in phosphorescent white streaks. These collided, then exploded in a sunburst: first gold, then green, then iridescent blue dimming into silver, showering among the marble towers, clinging to the gargoyles and has relief flutings on columns and porticos for a single glorious moment.

When the last of the silver sparkles faded, Death rode forth from the main gate of his palace.

His steed was crafted of things salvaged from his realm and was calculated to impress and intimidate, even as Mizar had been created to search and destroy. There was about it something of a dragon, something of a horse, and something of an eagle. Its colors were azure and ebony stolen from the day and night skies of vanished virt realms.