“Why?”
“It is unseemly, sir,” it said, “to question supernatural manifestations as you do,” and it winked out.
“Shit!” Donnerjack stated, and he turned and hurried back.
He entered the master bedroom. Nothing seemed to have changed. Could the ghost have meant for him to check the nursery? He placed his hand on Ayradyss’s shoulder, pressing gently.
“Darling,” he said. “We’ve had another of those ghostly visita—”
Her skin felt cold and as he shook her he realized that it was not living flesh that he nudged.
“Damn you, Death!” he screamed. “God damn you!”
He raised her, drew her to him, embraced her.
He held her for a long while and his eyes grew moist. Then, slowly, he lowered her.
“You have cheated me, Death,” he said softly. “You gave her back long enough to bear the child you wanted. Then you snatch her away again. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Then he stood.
“I keep my bargains, too,” he said.
Turning, he rose and crossed to the cradle that rested near to Ayra’s hand so that she might nurse the baby without needing to rise. The baby slept deeply and well, unaware of his loss.
Gingerly, Donnerjack raised the child in his arms and bore him with him to his study/workshop. There he deposited him in a portable crib he had recently installed in the place. Soon he was performing electronic measurements on his sleeping son’s body and brain. He did not yet have everything that he wanted in the way of information, but this might do for now.
He seated himself then at his design module, and he began to fashion a tiny bracelet that would hold his work. When the design was finished and checked, he fed it into a fabricator. While the bracelet was being made, he reviewed the deadly code for something else as he waited.
The baby sniffed a few times and he passed it a pacifier. A little later he realized that only a bottle of formula would do. He called for Dack to bring one and continued his work.
Perhaps five minutes later Dack appeared with the beverage. “It is in a nippled bottle,” he explained. “You did want it for the baby, did you not?”
“Yes,” said Donnerjack, “though now I see it I wouldn’t mind something cold for myself. A grape juice would be nice.”
Immediately, on Back’s departure, Donnerjack lowered his head to his arms and sobbed once. When the robot returned later, he was working again.
“Thank you, Dack,” he said. “Please cancel all of my appointments for the next week. I won’t be taking any calls during that time either— with a small list of exceptions which I will furnish shortly.”
“Yes, sir. It will be done.”
“…And stay out of the master bedroom for now.”
“As you would, sir.”
John D’Arcy Donnerjack located the ideal area just outside the south wall, shielded from the sun. He had the robots fence it as they constructed her coffin. He laid her to rest there, holding his infant son in his arms as the robots did the burying. Their hair stood on end, for the black box was strapped beneath his jacket and the new bracelet on his son’s tiny wrist. He did not notify any authorities of her death, for they had no record of her life, lady of Virtu.
In neither reality had there ever been such a machine as the Brass Babboon. Donnerjack assembled it carefully in Virtu—a great, sleek, long, low engine with a peculiar caboose, it shone like sunlight on the China Sea before a typhoon, had a whistle like the final shriek of a damned soul, and spouted fireworks rather than smoke and cinders. It cannibalized realities, broke the bounds of virtual domains, and tore like a meteor through anything, spewing gleaming tracks before it as it went, leaving a horde of irate genü loci to adjust to its passage. It was faced with the visage of a great grinning baboon. It was designed to be virtually unstoppable as well as intimidating.
Donnerjack calculated an existence theorem that worked out the necessary coordinates for the hidden valley where strange attractors grew on trees, proceeded to this point, then distributed many of these in a variety of ways in both the engine and caboose.
As he passed before the chugging engine’s cab, the baboon face blew a smoke ring, grinned more widely, and said, “Ready whenever you are, J. D.”
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.”