“Apart from the pure beauty of it, I’d love to tie together the things I’ve been doing with more understanding. Too bad old Warren isn’t around to help.”
“Yes, that would be like the old days.”
“Tell me, can you get out of bed?”
“Oh, yes, they’re walking me every day—a little farther each time. I’ll tell you right now, I’m better than I was the last time something came up.”
“Great. Then let’s talk once a week, whether or not we’ve made progress.”
“Okay. It’s good to have a colleague again.”
TWO
They worked together for the better part of three months, during which time—try as he might not to—Donnerjack completed the design of Death’s palace. The uniform theory was further along and almost completely in Jordan’s hands by that time. Donnerjack had done the best he could for the time available on his projects, and he had carried his bracelet work to another stage, an order of magnitude more powerful than it had been. He played with his son every afternoon in Virtu’s surroundings, on and off of the Great Stage.
The day finally came when he saw a moire flash by the window. He checked his fields, then increased their intensity. Several hours passed uneventfully, then he noticed that a violet aura had come into being about each projector he could see from his office window.
He moved to his main control and intensified the fields. In crossing the room he glanced at his computer screen. It was displaying a skull.
“Hm. Under attack. All right,” he said.
Using a set of receivers on the roof, he attempted to triangulate for the source of the energy. Nothing. It was just there. He raised the intensity again and moved to the screen.
“Are you just decoration, or do you want to talk?” he asked.
There was no reply.
“If you make it through, give me a shot at you hand to hand. I’m willing to try dismembering you.”
The figure on the screen remained unchanging.
“All right. Your fields against mine,” he said. “Let me know when you want to call it a day.”
The projectors suddenly flared, as if the aurora borealis walked among them. He turned the power all the way up.
The projectors began to whine.
“Trying to burn them out, are you? Wait till I kick in the backups.”
All that day and much of the night the duel went on. Then abruptly, about dawn, the attack let up. Donnerjack heard a chuckle and glanced at the screen. The skull slowly faded.
“Does that mean he found a flaw?” Donnerjack wondered aloud. “Or is it just a part of the war of nerves?”
He lowered the fields. They would all have to be reset now, of course. And he wondered how much his opponent had learned during the long assault.
Propping his feet on his desk he leaned back in his reclining chair and slept. And that was how Dack found him later, save that his heart had stopped beating and he no longer breathed.
John D’Arcy Donnerjack was laid to rest beside his beloved Ayradyss. It rained that day and somewhere in the mountains the piper played. For three nights the banshee howled. When Reese Jordan called later he was told that Donnerjack was traveling.
Dack had suddenly to become expert on the care and feeding of young children. He consulted all of the recipes for everything that had been given to the boy and he bathed him several times a day, changing him when necessary. Under his ministrations, John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Junior gained weight, smiled occasionally, and yelled regularly. The medbot was able to take care of all his childhood diseases and immunizations. Every day Dack left him to play on the Great Stage, where he beheld many wonders but fortunately was immune to their touch.
The months rolled on, as did the seasons. Calls for Donnerjack grew fewer and fewer, as it seemed he was always traveling. Dack spoke with the child every day, and when the boy began responding he doubled his efforts.
A number of times Dack was certain he overheard the boy babbling to someone else. Exploring, he found him in the company of a dog— possibly—which looked to have been fathered by a junk heap. There was something terribly intimidating about it, though he could not say what it was. One time, there was nothing there but a beautiful black butterfly of a sort he had never seen before. He could understand a child’s talking to something that had interested him, but it had sounded like a two-sided conversation. Later, it was a long shimmering snake with scales like beaten copper with whom he found him. Later still, a monkeylike creature. He shrugged his plastic and metal shoulders. They could do the boy no physical harm. And talking, he knew, was good for him at this point.
“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.