The Road to Amber Read Online Free PDF

George R. R. Martin, went to visit Roger in his house in Santa Fe (where he gave us a tour of his office and told us slyly that he’d like to win a Gandalf Award and a Balrog Award, so that he could have them fighting each other on an office shelf). Afterward, we went with the Zelaznys and their young children to watch the Zozobra Festival, a totally artificial “folk” ritual, thought up by cultural anthropologists, where a giant puppet of Old Man Gloom is set on fire and burns to ash, taking all the troubles and misfortune of the old year with it.
    Roger sat on the ground, arms wrapped around his long legs, watching all thls intently. There came that delighted, childlike grin again, the grin of a man who saw the essential absurdity of the world and celebrated it because it was absurd, a benign Trickster who, like Corwin or Sam, showed only those cards to the others in the game that he cared to show, but who played the game with elan and panache and enjoyed it thoroughly until the very moment when the time came to cash in his chips.
—Gardner Dozois

Zelazny deliberately blurred the line between sf and fantasy, especially in Lord of Light . See “…And Call Me Roger” part 2 (in volume 2 of this collection). He also talked about mixing sf and fantasy in the Amber series (see “…And Call Me Roger” in volumes 2 and 3).

STORIES

Godson
Black Thorn, White Rose , eds. Ellen Dadow & Terri Windling, Eos 1994.
    T he first time I saw Morris Leatham, at the baptismal font where he became my godfather, I was too small for the memory to stick. Thereafter he visited me every year on my birthday, and this year was no exception.
    “Morrie,” I said, knuckling my right eye and then my left. I opened them and stared through the predawn light of my bedroom to the chair beside the window with the dead geranium on the sill, where he sat, tall and thin, almost anorectic-looking.
    He rose, smiling, and crossed to the side of the bed. He extended a hand, drew me to my feet, and passed me my robe. “Put it on,” he said, as he led me out of the room. My Aunt Rose and Uncle Matt were still asleep. Moments later, it seemed, Morrie and I were walking inside the local mall. It was dimly lit, and there was no one about.
    “What are we doing here?” I asked.
    “I’d like you to walk through, look around, and tell me what you’d like for a birthday present.”
    “I know right where it is,” I said. “Come on.”
    I led him past the bench where the night watchman lay unmoving, a wet spot at the crotch of his uniform trousers. I stopped before a store window and pointed.
    “Which one?” Morrie asked.
    “The black one,” I said.
    He chuckled.
    “One black bicycle for David,” he said. ”I’ll get you one like that, onIy better. It’ll be delivered later today.”
    “Thank you,” I said, turning and hugging him. Then, “Don’t you think we ought to wake that guard up? His boss might come by.”
    “He’s been dead for some time, David. Myocardial infarct. Died in his sleep.”
    “Oh.”
    “That’s how most people say they’d like to go, so he had it good,” Morrie told me. “Just turned seventy-three last month. His boss thought he was younger. Name’s William Strayleigh—‘Bill,’ to his friends.”
    “Gee, you know a lot of people.”
    “You meet everybody in my line of work.”
    I wasn’t sure what Morrie’s line of work was, exactly, but I nodded as if I were.
    I woke up again later and cleaned up and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. There was a birthday card beside my plate, and I opened it and read it and said, “Thanks, Aunt Rose.”
    “Just wanted you to know we hadn’t forgotten,” she said.
    “My godfather Morrie remembered, too. He was by earlier, and he took me to the mall to pick out a present and—”
    She glanced at the clock.
    “The mall doesn’t open for another half hour.”
    “I know,” I said. “But he got me in anyway. Too bad about the night watchman, though. Died