Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny

CHANGING OF THE GUARD ROBERT WAYNE MCCOY AND THOMAS F. MONTELEONE

IF I STARTED OUT BY TELLING YOU MY REAL NAME WAS THOR and I’d spent the previous evening in a wrestling match with Jesus, you probably wouldn’t believe me.

I doubted my old college roommate, Jay Leshinsky, would either. So when he asked me how I was feeling, I eased into my story by way of an elaborate retelling of a dream I’d been having with alarming frequency.

About once a month Jay and I would get together with a couple of other professors at Middlebury College for a few hours of poker, microbrews, and conversation banal and profane. Afterwards, Jay and I would usually stop at this all-night diner on Route 7 for some coffee and cheesecake before I drove back up to my house in Burlington. The last two months hadn’t been much fun for me because I was still trying to get used to the idea that, yes, my father had really died, and another door had been closed in my life. The old man had been living with me and Margaret ever since he’d retired from the carpentry business at the age of eighty-two. A couple of years of sitting there with a remote control in his hand didn’t seem to excite a guy who’d been extremely active all his life, so I guess he kind of let go of things, just let himself wear out.

But I missed him terribly, and Jay had made himself available to listen to my regrets and reminiscences. As we sat there in the booth at the diner, the only people other than Susan, the third-shift waitress, and a plaid-capped trucker at the counter, I sipped my coffee from a thick, dinged-up, porcelain mug.

“It’s this dream I keep having,” I said.

“About your father?” said Jay.

I shrugged. “Not that I can tell. It’s just weird, that’s all. Listen ...”

I walk along a path that twists through absolute darkness like a silvery ribbon of satin that has been Mobiused through time and space. I am striding boldly toward a point that feels familiar, as though I’ve been there many times, yet it also appears alien and unknown. The night writhes about me in lively anticipation, the air around me feels charged. It is an invigorating sensation, and my breath escapes me in rapid bursts of frosted air.

I’m carrying a really huge hammer made of some dense metal, and I know the hammer has a name: Mjolnir. It feels like a weapon, a comfortable and familiar one. I speak its name and it begins to glow as if just raised from a blacksmith’s forge. As I walk forward, I begin the Summoning. It’s an ancient ritual that I know by heart, but I have no idea how I know it. I have a feeling that I am moving toward a confrontation, but I feel no fear, no anticipation. I am on some kind of mission, I can sense this, in the tradition of my father. Don’t ask me how I know this; it just seems to be a part of who I am.

Which is a pretty big, muscular guy. I look down at my broad chest, feel it pushing against some polished body-armor, and even I am impressed. I feel powerful, confident, driven. The twisting path through darkness begins to fan out in front of me and it transforms into a vast, snow-blanketed plane. It appears endless, and a hideous silence holds the place in its eternal grip.

Taking a breath, I inhale the salty tang of the sea, the lingering scent of a thousand ancient tales. I close my eyes and call my allies; icy winds skim across dark waters like razors. The winds come to me like faithful pets, surrounding me, whirling about me, carrying the detritus of their passage, full of discontent.

Something bad was going to happen, I could tell that much, but nothing more than that.

As I stood there at the edge of the endless place, I watched a cold, yellow fog roll inexorably toward me. It is the stuff of distortion, its essence obscuring the world about me, sculpting phantoms and specters. Tricks of the eye ... or maybe not.

It is time to call forth the rest of my elements, my soldiers and allies. I know this, and the simple thought brings it into being. I beckon an incredible torrent of rain and roiling thunder, torn like sheets from the darkness that enfolds me. And then the lightning dances around me, nocked like arrows and ready to be unleashed. All these things come to me, surrounding me protectively, like the powerful embrace of a friend long lost.

The ground shakes and ripples, sending out great waves along the solid plane ahead of me. The earth screams, hurling out volcanic gouts of fire like pillars to hold up a dead sky.

I watch as the ground in front of me splits open, like a seal being broken. An unholy enemy comes forth; the first wave bubbles forth from the fissures like lava, out and into the world.

And I meet them with uncompromising fury on what I suddenly know is the longest of all nights. I know I have relived this night many times, but I am still amazed by the sheer spectacle of the macabre unfolding before me.

They were the creatures of the pit, born of sin and pain and hellfire. Bloody claws, rotted teeth, some with sleek, knotted muscle, coiled and wound like springs, others immensely bloated and diseased. Insane features grafted onto familiar ones. Beasts both natural and of nightmare. My enemies drip acid and slime from pores and maws, hate from eyes of fire. Like crabs on a beach, they scuttle toward me, their bodies of hard bone, spiked and horned, mandibles clicking. Others fly, slither, lurch, and shamble. A flood of all that is loathsome and evil, and I seem to be the only thing standing between them and the world they seek to devour.

But this didn’t seem to bother me.

Raising my mighty hammer, I notice it is now glowing like something radioactive: white hot, pulsing like a living thing. With a single arc of my hammer, I will my rampaging rain and arctic winds against the dark horde, and it surges over the blanket of bodies with titanic force. Back into the pit, the millions of creatures collapse into a spiraling mass of flesh and bone. They are washed away like the dirty water at the bottom of a drain, and I know they cannot best me.

I simply stand and watch, knowing this was but the first wave and they the lesser of my foe.

But I do not wait long before an immense serpent rises from the pit, carried on wings which look like they could cover a lot of football fields. It scales are black and iridescent; and liquid fire drips from its mouth, sizzling loudly on. It looks at me with emerald eyes, bulging like giant blisters from its streamlined head. It is a gaze designed to paralyze me with fear as it dips to swallow me with a single snap of its open-scooped jaw.

I smile and unleash my lightning like arrows from a phalanx of longbows.

The dark vault of the endless night above me suddenly pales under the fusillade of white heat. The vault cracks as jagged pieces of light converge on the serpent. On impact, the creature shudders, ravaged by bolt upon countless bolt. It staggers back like a heavyweight stumbling under the savage assault of a master. Its great eyes go slack and pale, and its black scales grow dull as they begin to smolder. The great head swings past me like a pendulum and I see my reflection for the briefest instant in the mirror of its already-dead eyes.

I am smiling.

But there is a final wave. This I know. There always is a final onslaught of the ebon legions, a final clash of my power against hordes of the broken seal. They flow the pit like lava once again, and I raise my weapon to redirect my energy. The rain and wind and lightning batter the advancing columns of evil, but this time, it is different. They do not fall back, or even stagger against my power.

For the first time, I feel . . . unsure, even a bit anxious.

And then, from behind me, a tremendous blast of light rushes past me like a burst from a nuclear bomb as its shock and heat waves ripple outward from ground zero. I watch as the demon armies are withered in the devastating wash of radiation. This time they do not so much reel from the deadly blow they receive as they are simply crisped into papery ash and blown away in the single blink of an eye.

It is suddenly over. I lower my hammer and the raging storms whirling around me like a force field abruptly dissipate. The keening, humming sound runs down, as if someone pulled the plug on a giant generator.

“Nice try,” says a voice behind me.

It catches me off-guard and I spin automatically at the sound, raising Mjolnir high above my head.

“What?” I say, admittedly confused.

I am surprised to see a man approaching me with a casual, fearless gait. A subtle nimbus of light precedes him, dispelling the heavy cloak of dread that has weighted down this place.

“I figured I’d better give you a little help,” he says. “Before things got out of control.”

He is of average size and looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him. He favors no protective gear, and looks slightly effeminate in the pale caftan he wears. But I stand in respect because of what I’ve just seen him do.

“What do you know of my mission?” I say.

The man shrugs. “Enough to know you won’t be needing to do it any longer. Excuse me for a second. ...”

I watch as he holds up a single index finger for an instant, then turns to the open crevasse of the pit, looking like an unhealing wound.

“In the name of my Father, I cast you demons of hell from this place, and close the seal for all eternity.” His voice was gentle, but still seethed with power.

I watch: the earth groans as the entrance to the pit seals over and is gone. I know somehow it will never open again.

“Who are you?” I asked of him, boldness filling my voice.

“I am the new defender of the light. I am the truth, and whomever comes by me comes to the All Father.” He smiled.

“Odin is the father.”

He walked toward me, arms outstretched. I could see there were nail holes in his palms, but they were scarred and seemed to cause him no pain. “Well, yes, he is ... but Odin has a Father as well.”

“No! This cannot be.” But even as I say these words, I know they are hollow. Having just witnessed the power of this man, I am already half-convinced.

“Sorry,” he says. “But I’m afraid it is. . . .”

“What does this mean?” I ask sincerely, because I truly do not understand what our meeting portends.

“Thor,” he says gently. “You’ve done a good job. A great job, really. But it’s time to let someone else take their turn.”

“But there is no ‘time’ for me,” I say. “There never has been.”

“Oh, yes, there was,” he says. “You just never knew it.”

“Your words are like a paradox.” I shake my head, step back to regard him more fully. I must admit that despite his simple appearance, I am afraid of him.

“Only because you choose to hear them as such.” He extends a hand. “Come on with me. I will find you plenty of good work to do with the new regime.”

I hesitate, holding my great hammer in front of me.

“You know,” I say slowly, “I want to go along with what you say, but it seems to go against my ... purpose, my nature.”

The man smiles. “How about if we settle this the easiest way—a little wrestling match.”

“What?!” I am truly surprised by his words. “Are you kidding?”

“Serious as cancer, my friend.”

“But why? To what end?”

“When I win, you’ll work for me and my father.”

I study him for a moment, regarding his frail frame. Anybody betting on us wouldn’t give him a chance against me.

I nod. “Okay, let’s do it. . . .”

I set Mjolnir aside and move to grapple with him. He steps forward into the embrace of my attempt for a quick takedown. I close down on him and I am surprised by the tensile strength of his lean arms and shoulders. He is built like tightly wrapped steel cable, but offers little resistance. I make the mistake of assuming this is a lack of ability or power. Planting my thick legs, I prepare for a body-lift and slam—

—but he twists deftly, turns, and tilts me over his hip. It is one of those arcane, subtle, martial arts moves that I have never understood and appreciated even less.

Large error, that.

In an instant, I am hurtling through the air, my own massive bulk allied with gravity against me. I slam onto the ancient pathway like a safe falling from a loft.

Looking up, I see him smiling at me. “Too bad,” he says. “You want to try two out of three?”

This pisses me off and I leap upward, lunging for him with an embarrassing grunt. Stepping aside with the grace of a matador, he avoids my charge, and barely touches my arm at the elbow and wrist. Using the force of my own forward momentum and his own keen sense of leverage and balance, I am again sent hurtling into the air on a very short flight.

When I impact on my back, I am again looking up at him. Smiling, he offers me his hand.

“That’s okay,” he says. “No hard feelings, my friend. No big deal, you’ll just be working for my father and me.”

“Doing what?” I say.

“Well, your job specs are going to change, but we will need you eventually.”

“When?”

He shrugs. “Not sure yet. You know how it is with something as bothersome as time.”

I nod. He was right about that.

“So let’s do it like this,” he says. “For now, you won’t remember any of this. You’ll have a kind of ‘secret identity,’ a regular life, probably a whole series of them, just like your father did.”

“My father?”

He waves off my question. “Too much explaining for right now. You’ll understand everything eventually. But for now, it’s better if you don’t remember any of this.”

And I didn’t . . .

“... until these dreams started. And I keep having this feeling that they’re really memories of my past reality.”

Jay grinned. “That’s a nice touch—wrestling with Jesus.”

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I said.

“Of course not. Freud would say you are experiencing some great resentment toward your father, or a latent reverse-Oedipus complex, or something like that. Who knows?’’

“Is that all it means?” I sipped the last of my coffee.

“Even if it is true, and you are, or were Thor, so what?” Jay looked at me sagely, like a philosopher. “You’re Bob Schaller these days, and doing a real good job of it.”

“Do you believe in God?” I said.

Jay shrugged. “Some days I might say yes, and some days no. But remember, I used to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the American Dream. Maybe if we’re lucky, part of us never stops. ...”

“Easy for you to be so casual about it, Jay. But to tell you the truth, it’s got me kind of scared. I’m even afraid to tell Margaret about it.”

My friend nodded. “Well, if you are some ancient god, then so be it. It’s something out of your control. Or, on the other hand, if your dream is just a dream laced with symbolism relevant to real events in your life, then that’s okay too.”

“That seems so existential,” I said.

“Well, it is. The point is there’s nothing you can do about it, no reason to fret over it, I mean. Don’t let it bug you. I’ll always be here if you want to talk about it. But you’re not crazy, that’s for sure.”

Just about then, Susan came to check the levels in our coffee cups, but we both waved her off. I paid the tab, and we headed out to the parking lot and our cars. I thanked Jay for listening, and he told me to stop worrying. We shook hands in the hardy, muscular way of true male bonding, and retreated to the safe harbors of our vehicles before things got too sappy.

As I headed north toward Burlington, rethinking our conversation and my crazy dream, I figured out what I would do, as soon I got home.

Down in the basement, under my workbench, lay dad’s old grease- and paint-spattered tool box. I thought it might be a good idea if I could take out that carpenter’s hammer Dad said I should keep, even after he was gone.

I’m going to hold it in my hands, and speak its name.

After that, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. . . .

I never had the honor of meeting Roger Zelazny, though I feel as if I knew him as a friend. I never sat and held a conversation with him, but yet I can say with assurance he has talked to me.

I first became acquainted with Roger several years ago at the urgings of a friend, Steve S. We were both role players since childhood and he introduced me to a diceless role-playing game called Amber. I was hooked, not only on Amber; there was an insatiable need to read everything Roger had written, knowing that this was just a starting point to his wonderful, imaginative mind and fiction. Before it was even considered a style, Roger brought to life the science fantasy genre.

I showed my cousin, Tom Monteleone, some of the stories I had written. He told me that I had what it took to be a writer and described the journey. Tom became my mentor, showing me the business. Most importantly, he became my friend. He also knew Roger, from when they both lived in Baltimore. I was floored. Roger’s works had been my classroom, he the silent teacher.

My journey is not complete, but my dream of being a full-time writer is in sight. I would never say that “Changing of the Guard” is representational of Roger’s work. If anything, it is an approximation, a mere shadow of his grace and craft. In this tribute, I do not say goodbye. I will keep walking the wasteland until I reach my goal. I am comforted to know in some way, I don’t travel alone. When it is late at night and I lie curled up rereading one of his master works, I will learn something new, I will hear another voiceless whisper from a friend.

Thanks, Roger.

I try not to think about it too often—that he’s really gone—because it bothers me to know that a mind so clever, so incredibly bright and curious, has been shut down.

I respected Roger Zelazny as a writer and a thinker and an inspiration, but most importantly as a friend. When I met him, in 1971, he was enjoying a peak of critical popularity and just entering a period of work that would ensure him a decent level of commercial success as well. At the time, genre publishing was in a kind of mini-boom phase, gearing up (even though they didn’t know it) for the day Luke would zap the Death Star and change everything.

I was working on my master’s degree in English (with the idea that I could teach college), but I really wanted to be a writer, a science fiction writer, and I had selected several writers whose work I wanted to emulate because of their originality and their literate approach to the genre.¹ One of them was Roger Zelazny. And the funny part was that I had no idea back then that he, like me, lived in Baltimore and was less than fifteen minutes’ drive from my house.

After I met him at a convention in Washington, D.C, he gave me his phone number and said I could call him any time for advice or encouragement regarding my writing and the whole business of becoming a writer. I was reluctant to take him up on it because I didn’t want to bug him. So we remained acquaintances, and didn’t really become friends until I asked him if he’d like to be the subject of my master’s thesis (!).

Yeah, I agree—what a surprise.

Thinking back on it, I’m sure he was kind of stunned that his work might be placed under the dusty lens of a microscope forged in the groves of academe, but he graciously agreed, and opened himself up to about six months of intensive and (I realize now) invasive interviews, discussions, and bull sessions. It was during that time, meeting with Roger for hours at a clip, my cheesy tape recorder grinding on, that I discovered several important things about Roger Zelazny: he was one of the smartest people I’d ever met; he was easily the most gentle and kind man I’d ever met; and that I couldn’t imagine ever having a friend as genuine and undemanding as he.

I also learned to appreciate what good writing was all about. In forcing myself to analyze Roger’s stories, taking them apart and spreading all the pinions and gears across my desktop, I learned how a true craftsman works. His short fiction of the sixties and seventies had a magical, lyrical quality, containing just the right amounts of emotion, humor, and intellect to make them soar above the rest of us. In fact, I’m not going to preach to the converted here. If you’re reading this pale tribute to Roger, you already know what a fine writer he was.

Better if I tried to tell you something you might not know about him.

Like:

When he moved to Santa Fe, we would correspond erratically, and his letters (which still reside in one of my many file cabinets) were always single-spaced, never less than seven or eight pages, and impeccably typed. I was always knocked out by the content of his letters—a heady mix of local/family news, writing projects, and wonderfully tangential observations and philosophizings in that same jeweled style that made his prose sing so. But I was almost equally impressed by the typescripts themselves— they were, as I said, always perfectly typed. Never a misspelling, a typo, any errant mark or scratch-out. I used to marvel at how he could just sit down at his typewriter and just glide across the keys without a single hitch. He was stylish and elegant even in the way he typed, but it was an indicator of a mind so sharp and clean and always in control. He always knew what he wanted to say and how to say it, and he never missed a stroke. Incredible when you think about it.

Or the night we were sitting in his living room smoking pipes (a period when we had both tried them as an interim bridge to quitting nicotine) and he said: “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, ever, not even my wife.” And I sat there feeling honored and special, and a little scared, as he told me about a thing in his life that frightened him and drove him, and that he eventually conquered. I never shared what he told me, and I won’t now. But I can tell you it was a night when I witnessed a side of Roger few ever did, and felt ever more his solid friend for it.

Or another night that we were driving back to Baltimore from the University of Maryland after he had been there to give a talk and a reading. He told me about this weird recurring dream he had: in which it was apparent that everything he’d ever done was a fraud, and that sooner or later, people would be “on” to him, and he would be discovered to be a complete and utter fake. I can remember being so shaken by what he said and the way he talked about it that I found I couldn’t really comment without sounding like a fool. I was still in my twenties back then, and hadn’t been living off my imagination as long or as well as Roger had; and so I really wasn’t equipped to understand what his dream meant or why it hounded him so. I think, now, I know more about what he spoke that night. A lot more.

He was trying to tell me that writing is perhaps the strangest of professions. We who do it for any lasting amount of time are most likely driven to do it. We probably couldn’t live without writing. But at the same time, we live in fear of the day when there might be nothing left to write, nothing left to say. The scariest thing for any of us is to stare into the dark pool that is the reflection of our soul and admit we’re starting to repeat ourselves, allowing ourselves to get fat and lazy and use the same trick or plot device, or the same kind of character.

Because what does that really mean?

Are we running out of ideas, or something far worse? Do we ever reach a point when we stop seeing the world through the eyes of the star-gazing twelve-year-old when he almost comprehends the limitless complexity of the universe? Can our own personal vision, our sense of wonder, ever just seize up like an old truck engine and stop?

Sure, I guess it can. But not for the best of us.

So, I think I know what Roger was trying to articulate that night as we rode through the darkness between the cities. If I’d better understood the process back then, I’d have told him he had nothing to worry about.

He still doesn’t.

¹ And as far as the story I wrote for this anthology with Bob McCoy, I can’t say that it reads like a “Zelazny story,” but I must hope that it at least conveys the spirit of his work—his mordant and often playful interpretation of classic myths and philosophical or religious themes. The style of the story is at best a pale approximation of Roger’s clean, yet poetic, lines, but again, we hope imitation serves as the finest form of flattery.

In his short story “And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee,” Roger took a wry look at the tale of the Flying Dutchman. In his piece, John Varley returns to the fertile waters of that legend for a story that any air traveler will read with a shudder.