The Road to Amber (50 page)

Dauershlaf
is a rarely-used form of therapy which employs medication to induce a coma-like state.
Stanislaw Ulam
was a Polish-born mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project to design the first atomic bomb.
Edward Teller
, often called the “father of the atomic bomb,” was a Hungarian-born physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project.
Tom Lehrer
was an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. In our reality, he had no involvement in the Manhattan Project, but he did research radioactivity at Los Alamos, and he lectured on mathematics.

Freud’s ideas on infantile sexuality and stages of development
maintained that infants and children seek bodily/sexual pleasure, passing through several stages: oral (sucking), anal (defecation), phallic (sexual organs), attraction to opposite gender parent and hatred of same-sex parent (Oedipus complex), latency (period of less pronounced sexual motivation), and then resurgence of a phallic phase with puberty.
Sublimation
channels the sex drive toward socially acceptable goals in the arts, science, etc. Freud’s proposed
structure of mind and personality
included the id (primitive mind), ego (rational mind), and superego (conscience).

Alfred Adler
, an Austrian psychologist, proposed that all individuals have a
drive to achieve perfection
. Austrian psychologist
Otto Rank
proposed that trauma and separation anxiety determined personality and behavior. Jung identified eight
personality types
(extroverted and introverted, each subdivided into categories of sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling). Jung’s
theory of individuation
says that a person becomes whole by an internal process of integration. Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen
coined
life lie
to mean the delusions we require to avoid an unbearable reality.

Actor
Humphrey Bogart (Bogie)
played cafe owner
Rick
Blaine in
Casablanca
. “As Time Goes By”
was the one tune that Rick forbade his piano player (
Sam
) to play, because it reminded him of his lost love Ilsa. Rick says, “Play it, Sam, Play it!” (commonly misquoted as “Play it again, Sam”) when he orders Sam to play the tune after all.

Zelazny lived in
Santa Fe
and visited
Los Alamos
.
Operation
or
Project Paper Clip
was the codename for the US project to extricate scientists from Germany during and after the final stages of World War II.
Bola
is a cord worn as a necktie.
Ivan Karamazov
figures in
The Brothers Karamazov
by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. A
butte
is a hill with sloping sides and a flat top, rising abruptly from the surrounding plain.
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs
was a German-born theoretical physicist who worked at Los Alamos. He was convicted of supplying the USSR with information on British and American atomic bomb research during and after WWII.
HUAC
was the House Un-American Activities Committee, an investigative body of the United States House of Representatives berween 1938 and 1975.

1. Letter from Roger Zelazny to Kevin Andrew Murphy, 23 February 1992.
   
2. Wild Cards Q&A,
   http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com
   , November 2007.
   

Zelazny originally sketched a map of Amber for
Hellride #1
, 1972. In that issue, Editor Ken St. Andre noted that “Liz Danforth fancied it up a bit, but this is essentially the map he sent to me when I wrote two months ago, asking for his help. I hope you like it, Mr. Z.” It has been further modified/redrawn by the artist for this volume of
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny.

H
e started out walking, into the dim labyrinth. There seemed to be a faint tune in the air…

It was almost too easy. A turning, a twisting, a doubling back…

And then he faced a rough, slanted wall, looked up and saw the shaft. He commenced climbing.

It was no longer easy. A swaying sensation began—faint, then distinct—as if he were mounting into the uppermost branches of a tall tree. His way brightened and then dimmed, repeatedly, in no perceptible pattern. After a time, his eyes ached. Images doubled, wavered…

When the way grew suddenly level he doubted his vision, till his extended hand assured him that there was indeed a choice of passages.

He leaned and moved his head into each of these. The faint musical sound seemed slightly louder in the one to the left, and he followed it. Of that, at least, he was certain.

Now his way rose and fell. He climbed up, he climbed down. The brightening and dimming continued, only now the brightness was brighter and the dimness dimmer.

And the sensations of external movement had not abated. The floor of the tunnel seemed to ripple beneath his feet, the walls and roof to contract and expand. He stumbled, caught himself. Stumbled again…

At the next turning the sounds grew slightly louder, and he realized that they were not a tune, but rather a totally random concatenation of noises.

He climbed. He descended. The passageway shrank, and finally he crawled.

The sensations of movement increased. At times he seemed to be spinning; other times, it felt as if he were falling into an enormous abyss.

The flashes of light now drove nails of pain into his skull. He began to hallucinate. Faces and figures. Flames. Or were they hallucinations?

He felt the first faint pulsation upon his left wrist… How long had he been moving? His clothes were already in tatters and he bled, painlessly, from a dozen scrapes and lacerations.

He descended a well and emerged somehow upward onto a floor. Mad laughter rang about him, ceasing only when he realized it to be his own.

The sounds grew even louder, until it felt as if he negotiated a gallery of demonic bells—wild, out of phase, their vibrations beating against him.

Thinking became painful. He knew that he must not stop, that he must not turn back, that he must not take any of the lesser turnings where the sounds came softer. Any of these courses would prove fatal. He reduced this to one imperative: Continue.

Again, a pulsing at his wrist, and a faint, slow movement.

He gritted his teeth when he saw that he must climb once more, for his limbs had grown heavy. Each movement seemed as if it were performed underwater—slowly, requiring more than normal effort.

A screen of smoke offered frightening resistance. He drove himself against it for an age before he passed through and felt his movements become easy once again. Six times this occurred, and each time the pressure against him was greater.

When he crawled out, drooling and dripping blood, on the other side of the chamber from which he had entered, his eyes darted wildly and could not fix upon the small, dark figure which stood before him.

“You are a fool,” it told him. It took some time for the words to register, and when they did he lacked the strength with which to reply.

“A lucky fool,” it went on, darkness flowing about it like wings. (Or were they really wings?) “I had not judged you ready to essay the Logrus for a long while yet.”

He closed his eyes against this speaker, and an image of the route he had followed danced within his mind’s seeing, like a bright, torn web folding in a breeze.

“…And a fool not to have borne a blade and so enchanted it…or a mirror, a chalice, or a wand to brace your magic. No, all I see is a piece of rope. You should have waited, for more instruction, for greater strength. What say you?”

He raised himself from the floor, and a mad light danced within his eyes. “It was time,” he said. “I was ready.”

“And a cord! What a half-ass—Uck!”

The cord, glowing now, tightened about his throat.

When the other released it, the dark one coughed and nodded.

“Perhaps—you knew—what you were doing—on that count…” it muttered. “Is it really time? You will be leaving?”

“Yes.” A dark cloak fell upon his shoulders. He heard the splash of water within a flask.

“Here.”

As he drank, the cord wrapped itself about his wrist and vanished.

“Thanks, Uncle,” he said, after several swallows.

The dark figure shook its head.

“Impulsive,” it said. “Just like your father.”

In response to “requests by fans, pressure from publishers, new story ideas,” Zelazny returned to Amber in 1985 with
Trumps of Doom
. He created new characters because “I pretty much told the story I had wanted to tell in the first series. I had wanted to return to that particular world, but I wanted to tell a totally different story. Also this would require a different viewpoint. Also, it’s interesting to deal with similar situations from a different character’s standpoint… I still have more stories I want to tell about the Amber universe. I had a rest, the characters had a rest, and I thought it would be a good time to go back and continue.”
[1]

The second series features Corwin’s son Merlin. Announced as a trilogy, it eventually comprised five books, paralleling Corwin’s series, originally a trilogy that grew to five. “I just finished a fifty-some thousand-word tale a week ago.
Nine Princes in Amber
, ‘tis called. It’s to be the first in a trilogy, re which the fans seem already enthusiastic, subsequent to a few readings I’ve given… It ends with a sort of cliff-hanger, but so did
A Princess of Mars
and look what happened there. I’ve already figured out the sequel,
The Guns of Avalon
, and have some strong notions regarding the third—
The Courts of Chaos
. More on these later, though.”
[2]

Written specifically for the signed, limited edition of
Trumps of Doom
from Underwood-Miller, this prolog does not appear in the regular hardcover or paperback versions of the novel.

Concatenation
means linked together as in a chain.

1. Xignals
   , XVI, Feb/Mar 1986.
   
2. Letter from Zelazny to Larry Ashmead, Doubleday, February 13, 1967.