The Road to Amber (82 page)

Having heard Milo’s story and learned these particulars, Sandow admits to having restored the first two worlds. Milo is furious, moves to attack Sandow. Sandow dodges several attacks without retaliating. Finally, Milo halts and says, “You didn’t know.” Then he sits down, head in hands. After a time, he says “They may be on to me now. May not, also, of course. My best bet is to take out Dwisdor quickly and move on.”

Sandow says, “I’ll help.”

Dwisdor and his own questors are subject to a fire-alarm-type effect (as are the others). In [unintelligible] millions—as his world is being shut down—he is twisted with a personal time-effect of the sort Sandow and Milo are using. Duel scenes with Sandow and Milo-fighting corpses, gem-studded cave of Ali Baba, time-astounded djinn (in vicinity)—and the blood tarantula (Slyve) of near-human intelligence. Sandow’s archer’s eye detects a massive land mass frozen in mid-slide. He pushes the action in that direction till their time fields activate the slide, crushing Dwisdor and Slyve.

They split up after that for a battle involving Sandow’s confrontation with Merriweather Tatchet, who summons warped demons of his past which drive him half-mad, till Shimbo intervenes with meteorological distortions which permit him to regain control of himself—also, of the mad environment (one must have been at least half mad at one time to gain this power). Dueling then with Merriweather, he succeeds in turning one of her own nightmare creations against her and sees her eaten by it.

Milo, in the next battle, proceeds against Mica for a deadly martial arts duel amid the Dysonized worldlets—fighting atop and inside, clusters of floating jewels, on the bridgeways between the worlds, in abundant floating costumes, in the guts of a giant computer, moving from point to point amid the toy worlds of a solar system the size of a football field. Milo’s martial arts skills did not fully prepare him for a man who seems part robot—but, displacing the orbits of worlds in the mini-system, he is finally able to trap Milo between two which are about to collide.

Sandow and Milo team up to go against Avalon Greer, the sorcerer. After a lively chase sequence (with Sandow’s companion finally cracking the language of Avalon’s spells) they corner the man in the dungeons of his Ruby Biome. As they move in for the kill, they are defeated by the arrival of Detco and Ishro Vadan, who had compared notes concerning the mysterious shutdowns and revivals of their respective universes. They have realized that some single individual is behind it all, though they have not yet determined him to be a survivor of the Pasqua Wipeout. However, Milo makes a point of informing his target as to who he is and why he’s doing what he’s doing, to make his revenge complete—and he had just finished telling this to Avalon Greer in anticipation of his death. Hard-pressed, he and Sandow escape with their lives by finding a flaw in the great Ruby and playing their lasers upon it. They make it back to the
Model T
and Milo’s
Shrike
and split the scene just a mile ahead of the posse.

Safe in subspace later, immersed in tubs of healing gel and passing a pitcher of Martinis (a totally out-of-common drink most bartenders, human and otherwise, have never heard of). Milo had asked for a popular drink, but Sandow had persuaded him to try the ancient mix.

[“Give me a Twi.”

[“A what?”

[“A drink with ice colade.”

[“Crap. Try something decent—like a Martini.”

[“What the hell’s a Martini?”

[“Try it and see.”]

While resting and sipping, they plot their next campaign.

Francis Sandow remains one of Zelazny’s most popular characters with three appearances: in
Isle of the Dead
, in “Dismal Light,” and a cameo in
To Die in Italbar
. “Every now and then I think about doing something more with Francis Sandow, the protagonist in my novel
Isle of the Dead
; it’s a possibility I could go back to that world.”
[1]
Zelazny returned to Sandow in the early 1990s with this outline for a novel or perhaps a graphic novel.

Zelazny differentiated Sandow and Conrad, “in a way Sandow is more civilized than Conrad. Basically, Conrad likes to be out on his ship or out in the woods. He enjoys knocking around; he has a sense of the Earth spirit. Whereas, I see Sandow as more of an urban type figure. He’s a recluse; he’s got all the amenities at his place. Sandow is more self-conscious than Conrad, and there’s an ironic streak in his nature. He laughs at himself more. He’s also an observer, watching what he’s doing and, possibly, being cynical about his own actions. He’s reflecting on what he is doing, and he’s able to laugh at it. Conrad doesn’t think at that sophisticated level. He exists purely for the moment and doesn’t reflect on things the same way.”
[2]

Written on yellow legal paper, the undated, handwritten manuscript is nine pages long; the first two pages and title are missing. It appears to be written on the same pad as
Psychoshop
(hand-dated 1993) and
Donnerjack
(also hand-dated 1993), and all three manuscripts lie in the same folder. Those facts and the story’s references to cyberpunk imply that it was probably written in the early 1990s, over twenty years after Zelazny last visited the character. We have titled this outline “Sandow’s Shadow” for the purpose of this collection.

This sketch evidently formed the foundation for the
Chronomaster
game (designed by Zelazny and Jane Lindskold and released in 1995) and
Chronomaster
novel (written by Jane Lindskold), in which “retired planet sculptor and terraformer” Rene Korda investigates why several artificial pocket universes have been placed in stasis.
[3]
A ship named
Shrike
also appears in the novel, but it adds elements not present in Zelazny’s outline, such as a “meddlesome ship’s computer named Jester.”
[4]
Zelazny’s contribution to the game appears to have been allowing this outline’s adaptation instead of writing it as a Sandow story. Lindskold wrote the game’s script, dialogue, and the tie-in novel.
[5]

1. Letter from Zelazny to Larry Ashmead. Doubleday. February 13. 1967.
   
2. Roger Zelazny by Theodore Krulik. Ungar 1986.
   
3. Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold’s Chronomaster [The Game]
   . IntraCorp Entertainment and Dreamforge Entertainment 1995.
   
4. Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold’s Chronomaster [A Novel]
   , by Jane Lindskold. Prima 1996.
   
5. Email from Jane Lindskold to Dr. Christopher Kovacs dated August 3. 2007.
   

S
ETTING: the world of
Jack of Shadows
, before the action in that book takes place. The planet rotates, the sun rises (in the west) and sets (in the east). Half of this world is forested, castled, primitive, inhabited by a feudal aristocracy of sorcerers and sorceresses. The other hemisphere is bleak and barren and empty. High atop Mt. Panicus, on the border between the inhabited and uninhabited realms bides a demonic-appearing being named Morningstar, whose torso merges with the rock of the mountain itself. He faces the east eternally, and seen from that side he appears to be only a strange statue. It is said that he may never look upon the rising sun, or the world as everyone knows it will come to an end. He watches sunsets. He is virtually omniscient.

The story opens with a youth—a sorcerer’s apprentice named Alex—climbing in the mountains for a forbidden glimpse of Morningstar. The sun sets, and a strange, brilliantly lighted city (futuristic, aircars circling its towers) appears from nowhere in the distant waste. Startled, Alex loses his footing and rolls down a slope, to land too near Morningstar. The horned giant seizes him and laughs. No spell can bind this strange being, so Alex pleads with him to release him. Morningstar surprises him by complying, after telling him that he has beheld a part of his destiny on the plain beyond. Alex begins to flee, and Morningstar tells him that he will be back for the rest of the story very soon, for even his master—an old sorcerer named Arkans—will be unable to help him in what is to come. “Run if you must, but tell him what you have beheld,” he adds.

Alex flees through the mountain range for much of the night. He can still see the city in the distance, until the light of morning falls upon it. Then it fades and vanishes. He returns to the Keep of the ancient sorcerer he serves: Arkans. He tells the obviously ailing old man what he has seen. Arkans nods and says, “It has come too soon—or too late.” He explains then that he has foreseen a personal encounter with a very powerful sorcerer—Brelt—who has been engaging in magical duels with other sorcerers, slaying them and absorbing their powers. He is now probably too strong for Arkans to oppose successfully—and Arkans is certain that he is next on the list. He did not understand why the man suddenly desired such powers as he was achieving until just now, when he heard Alex’s story.

He tells the youth how there was once a world of both cities and countryside where both magic and science coexisted. The urban centers were the scientific, mechanized places. The rural areas were the home of magic. One day in that world, long ago, an argument occurred between two brothers—one a mighty sorcerer, the other a great technician—as to which approach to life was superior. There was no satisfactory conclusion, so the sorcerer went away for several years and forged a powerful magical device—a wand like no other which had ever existed. During this time, the technician built a device, a portable keyboard instrument, the vibrations of which could affect the molecular structure of virtually anything. They agreed to fight a duel, pitting these devices against each other.