Drum pushed his plate to one side and brought up the intable dessert menu.
“A dinner like that deserves dessert.”
“I didn’t think I had any space left, but those pastries certainly look wonderful.”
“Shall I order a plate of the miniatures and a pot of espresso?”
Link grinned. “Just make certain that there are enough cannoli.”
“Sounds very good.” Drum toasted Link with the remnants of his wine. “Here’s to mysteries solved!”
“In both Virtu and Verite,” Link responded.
Their goblets chimed as they touched the rims together.
NINE
Spewing tracks before it, the Brass Babboon surged from the orchard wherein strange attractors grew upon gnarled trees that knew too much of possibility and grumbled portents in the harvesters’ ears.
“Where to, Jay?” the Brass Babboon inquired.
“To Deep Fields!” Jay answered, trying to make his voice bold and certain.
While Tranto and Dubhe had gathered the strange attractors, plucking them with fingers and trunk that had elongated and distorted as they neared the fruit (returning to normal as soon as the fruit was touched), he had studied the control panel for his father’s train. He felt now that he could operate the screens, the slicing scissors, the various launchers with a degree of confidence.
“Any thoughts about the route we should take?” the Brass Babboon asked. “Or do you expect an invitation?”
This last was said so sarcastically that Jay forbore from saying that he believed he had something in the way of a standing invitation. He didn’t think that anything could intimidate the terrible train, but if anything could so, knowing that Death awaited its passenger might be it.
“How did my father get in?”
“He seemed to feel that either the beginning or the end of time would serve equally well as a route. We went in at the beginning of time.” Maniacal laughter punctuated the reflection.
“I wonder if the same route would serve us?”
“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.”