The Road to Amber (85 page)

* * *

Is young Donnerjack somehow the result of a mating between a human male and a virtual woman? If so, how? It is true that the entire human genetic code has been sequenced, but how could its virtual representation serve for fertilization? Whatever—for now—is this the key to the ability he develops, while hanging out with Aions in Virtù? He finds out that he can pass physically through the interface RT and VR, manifesting anywhere within the network, traveling its strange unimaginable realms, merging with 3
^rd
stage forms when the desire arises. For he does these things into young manhood, never during all this time setting eyes on a real human; he only knows their “ghosts” whenever they visit VR.

* * *

Plots: a virtual religion has just recently arisen, certain pleasure parlors serving as gateways to places of worship of the gods of Virtù. It is treated by the media as just another on-line cult, its deities associated to RT gentilities. One proceeds through a flame-like field, reclines in an aesculaparian, rises and makes one’s way through Elysian fields to the sites of the services where the visitors simply recline. (Physically, in RT, it could be a dormitory, its true functions masked by VR constructs and their subsequent sensations VR-mediated.)

And a strange new disease has also arisen with a variety of symptoms, some of these hallucinatory, including psychotic episodes, others involving high blood pressure, syncope, cardiac arrhythmias, death by ventricular fibrillation or massive heart failure. Dr. Lydia Hazzard, a pathologist of the CDC, has been assigned to investigate this. She knows that, oddly, many of the victims are reported to fall into the category of “mud eaters,” people who for no apparent reason indulge an appetite for clay.

* * *

Death discovers someone rummaging in Dark Fields, making off with strange bits and pieces which had come to rest there. It’s an interesting place, with ways of converting visitors into clientele. Brave individuals, whoever/whatever they were. Death studies the area a long while, then begins his own gathering, assembling the pieces into something rare and strange.

* * *

A short, stereotypical detective, Dale Drum, shot in the course of an investigation, listed as DOA at a S.F. non-public hospital, recovers suddenly, strange gaps in his memories, odd additions. He’d been investigating the Net gods religion and had attended a type of secret ceremony with some others. His client is Istara Valdes, owner of the busiest brothel in San Francisco, and ostensibly concerned that orgiastic rites might detract from her business.

He meets the CDC doctor, Lydia, on the way to autopsy one of her own case studies. (She’s a friend of Mary Drake, the doctor attending his case.) He continues then talking about the reason Lydia’s alone. Tells her that he might be able to help with her investigation if she’ll help with his. He makes a date with her and slips away, anxious to avoid the police investigating his murder.

She was planning to see her daughter Cath that eve, and her daughter’s reporter boyfriend (of whom she doesn’t approve). He works for a sort of Rolling Stone-type mag. Later, in a lounge, she chides Drum for having left the hospital against medical advice, though he seems in fine shape now. She tells him about her investigation and the bit about the clay-eating. He admits to having picked up the habit himself, several months earlier, and he’d since become aware of its prevalence among Netgod worshippers. She is intrigued by this and wants to attend a service with him. This is done, and an attempt (in VR) is made on their lives. Donnerjack, who’s been watching the development of this cult with some curiosity, revives them, though they must flee along separate routes though VR, having various harrowing and provocative experiences along their ways. Donnerjack finds himself drawn to _______________ (the daughter)

All safely recovered and returned to RT (save for Donnerjack) the pursuit continues in what has been thought to be the safety of RT. Other things are learned, also. A very thorough autopsy reveals the presence of what might be a small, strange chip in the vicinity of the SA node of the heart in one of the victims of the parlor disease. Other corpses revealed a similar feature of such an excrescence, oddly positioned at an anterior point which generates an electrical impulse? It is not recognized as a chip, though—only a strange silicon tumor.

Donnerjack, hastens, suddenly lonely, talking to ghosts, realizes he wants to see ________ again, and decides for the first time to go looking for somebody in RT. Later, in the company of Lydia, he realizes that the thing is a chip, and they attempt to analyze its functions.

It is, it turns out, grown from a VR matrix of a gene-tailored virus installed in selected worshippers, on piercing through the farm-like families. Completing its growth perfectly, it will permit the gods of Virtù to take broadest control of these RT bodies temporarily or permanently, thus manifesting in a realm hitherto beyond their reach—“returning,” as they consider it, to the world from which they had been exiled, in terms of their own mythology.

Other characters get involved: Lydia’s boss, Dr. Morris Marten, a government investigator, George Carroll, an old colleague of Prof Donnerjack, Dr. Samuel Ellerby, and a preacher irked at the new religion—Axel Satus.

The chase/investigation goes on in RT. Revolutions ensue. Heavy action in Virtù, also.

Zelazny wasn’t pleased with how contemporary cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s
Neuromancer
and its many imitators treated virtual reality. He planned to rework the concept in the “non-cyberpunk”
Donnerjack
trilogy. Author William Sanders said, “Roger Zelazny often spoke of the need to rescue the virtual reality concept from the rather scabby literary neighborhood it had come to inhabit. VR, he would say, was (at least potentially) the most wonderful of all human creations; it ought to be more than just a technological background for stories about alienated youth versus vicious megacorporations.”
[1]
Unfortunately, only hints remain of Zelazny’s vision for the trilogy.

Dated 9/20/91, this handwritten manuscript in the Syracuse University Archives is Zelazny’s original outline for his trilogy (
Donnerjack, of Virtù
;
The Gods of Virtù
; and
Virtù, Virtù
). He started
Donnerjack, of Virtù
the following year, completing about a third before his death.
Psychoshop
and
Lord Demon
distracted him from working continuously on
Donnerjack
. Jane Lindskold completed it and published it as
Donnerjack
; its storyline encompassed the trilogy’s scope.

This rough outline lacks the polished language of a typical Zelazny story, and his illegible handwriting makes it impossible to determine the exact word he intended in every case. This treatment is included here to demonstrate his original vision of the trilogy and how it differs from the final novel.

The blank underscore comes from the manuscript, indicating that Zelazny had not yet determined a final name for Dr. Lydia Hazzard’s daughter.

Nymphs
are nature spirits, beautiful maidens inhabiting rivers, woods, or other locations; it also means a beautiful young woman.
Satyrs
are lustful, drunken woodland gods resembling men with a goat’s or horse’s ears, hind limbs and tails.
Bacchus
and
Dionysus
are names for the wine god, who loosens inhibitions and inspires musical and poetic creativity.
Ahriman
or Angra Mainyu is the spirit of darkness, chief adversary of supreme deity Ahura Mazda in the Iranian religion Zoroastrianism. Ahriman features prominently in the outline “The Ahriman Factor” that became the collaborative novel
The Mask of Loki
.
Dante’s Inferno
is the first book of Dante Alighieri’s
Divine Comedy
; it describes Dante’s descent through the nine circles of Hell.

EFT
means electronic funds transfer.
Tarzan
was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in part to demonstrate the effect that environment (growing up in a jungle uncorrupted by human influence) can have on a man’s character. The concept mirrored philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the
natural man
or Noble Savage: A man uncorrupted by civilization was nobler than his “civilized” contemporaries. Would John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Junior, uncorrupted by the real world, have a more moral character?

Aesculapius
is the Roman god of medicine and healing;
aesculapian
means physician. Zelazny’s neologism
aesculaparian
seems to imply a medical bed within virtual reality, similar to beds in sickbay on the starship
Enterprise
. In classical mythology, the
Elysian Fields
is where the blessed go after death.
Mud eating
and eating other non-food substances (chalk, clay, dried paint, ice, etc.) is pica; it can occur with mental illness, malnutrition, and pregnancy.
DOA
means Dead on Arrival. The S
A node
or sinoatrial node is the heart’s pacemaker, a specialized muscle area that undergoes timed electrical depolarizations.

This is the first page of the original handwritten outline for Donnerjack of Virtù. It may serve to explain the uncertainty about certain words and the occasional confusing sentence.

From the
Roger Zelazny Papers; Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

1. Sanders, William.
   New York Review o/Science Fiction #116
   , 1998, pp. 11-12.