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who would be good for a no-questions one-way trip out of this country. If
things got tight that gold bracelet ought to buy a good deal of cooperation.
It wasn t going to be easy, but the alternative was to land at some airfield,
tell his story to the authorities, and spend the next lengthy piece of his life in
an Egyptian prison.
Take care, sgilisi, Grandfather said. I ll be around. Like that, he
was gone. Jesse almost felt him leave. After a minute Jesse sighed and
settled back in the seat. Feeding in more throttle, pressing cautiously
against the cyclic, he watched the airspeed needle climb. Below him, the
Alouette s shadow flitted across the sand and the rocks, hurrying over
Egypt.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
I met Roger in the mid-sixties at a Baltimore establishment notable for its
overpriced drinks and underpaid entertain-ers. On weekends the latter item
was me, just back from Asia with a bad-conduct discharge, a new guitar,
and not a clue.
The clientele was mostly pretty awful. You could have had Jesus
Christ playing jazz theremin with Emily Dickin-son on vocals and few of
these precious proto-yuppies would have paused in their posing to listen.
But there was one skinny, long-nosed guy who did listen, and even made
requests usually for Waltzing Matilda.
One of the waitresses, with whom I was hotly involved, said his name
was Roger. She reported that he tipped well and never tried to grope her.
That was all we knew; he was just one of those shy guys you find in any bar
in the world.
Later things went bad for me. I lost the job, the lover, and the guitar, in
that order, and next year found myself in Omaha, sweating a couple of
California felony warrants.
One night I picked up a new paperback titled Lord of Light and read it
straight through, pausing only to exclaim Holy shit! and the like. The
fast-moving prose, the excruciating gags, the use of ancient mythic figures
in modern fantasy fiction I d never read anything like it before. But it never
occurred to me to connect this Roger Zelazny with the bony table-sitter
who had loved the Antipodean national ballad.
It was a couple of decades before our paths crossed again. By then I
was a Promising First Novelist; Roger contributed a cover quote. (Roger s
cover quotes were leg-endary. No one was quicker to help a struggling
newcomer with a blurb.) I called to thank him and at some point in the
conversation a circuit closed: You mean you re the guy who Yeah, and
you Hey, remember when
We stayed in touch; we became, well, friends. Roger had an
extremely rare quality: he listened. During one especially low time in my
personal life, he was an authen-tic lifeline. No matter how late it was, how
drunk I was, or how depressing my latest tale, he never brushed me off or
hung up on me.
On the professional side, it was Roger who got me back into the sf&f
field after a long bitter absence, and who first suggested I try writing
modern fantasies based on American Indian themes. Without Roger s
encouragement and guidance I would have dropped out of the game years
ago.
When I heard that he was dead I wandered about the house crying
helplessly for hours; and then late that night I got very, very drunk, and at
last got out my current guitar and played Waltzing Matilda over and over
again in the dark.
* * * *
The novel published as This Immortal first appeared under the title . . .
And Call Me Conrad. It won Roger his first Hugo. In the following tale,
Robert Silverberg s Titan discovers, as did Conrad, that nothing ever
goes quite as one plans.
CALL ME TITAN
ROBERT SILVERBERG
In Memoriam: RZ
HOW DID YOU GET LOOSE? THE WOMAN WHO WAS APHRODITE
asked me.
It happened. Here I am.
Yes, she said. You. Of all of them, you. In this lovely place. She
waved at the shining sun-bright sea, the glittering white stripe of the beach,
the whitewashed houses, the bare brown hills. A lovely place, yes, this isle
of Mykonos. And what are you going to do now?
What I was created to do, I told her. You know.
She considered that. We were drinking ouzo on the rocks, on the
hotel patio, beneath a hanging array of fish-erman s nets. After a moment
she laughed, that irresistible tinkling laugh of hers, and clinked her glass
against mine.
Lots of luck, she said.
* * * *
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