The Road to Amber Read Free

cancer. He offered me an out. I told him he was crazy, that if he was sick, I needed to be there.
    But we delayed my arrival until the end of the term. This gave Roger time to start chemo, to inform his family of changes to come, to deal with a lot of things that arise at such times. We talked daily. We still wrote letters, pretty much daily. And June of 1994 came, and I went south.
    Roger met me in North Carolina. We drove west in my sedan with my six cats. He’d always been thin, but I was shocked at how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him. I’d brought a bunch of recorded books and old radio dramas, but we didn’t listen to a single one. We talked steadily for days. We’d keep talking for the next eleven months and a bit.
    I’m not sure what we talked about. The same old stuff, I guess: history, biography, mythology, theology, science, poetry, our lives together and apart, and writing, always writing. Roger read me the Bunnicula books while I did cross-stitch beadwork. I introduced him to role-playing games. We both wrote.
    I taught him how to make crepes. He insisted on learning how to flip them, rather than turning them with a spatula. We bought a guinea pig. She had babies. Roger was thrilled and insisted we keep all three. When Roger was strong enough, we went touring locally. We went to conventions. We went to New Zealand.
    Somewhere in there, the chemo stopped working. I was at his side when Roger stopped breathing. And stopped talking. And was finally quiet.
    Except that Roger’s stories are still there making beautiful noise. Those stories are all his—the silly ones and the serious ones, the poetic and the crass, the science fiction and the fantasy. Altogether they are a complex body of work that, when taken in total, come close to reflecting a complex and fascinating man.
—Jane Lindskold

Remembering Roger
by Gerald Hausman
    W hen Roger and I were collaborating on the novel Wilderness , he would have dinner at our home and secretly sign several of his books in my living room bookshelf—never more than a couple at time—and always leave a little message for me to find at some later date. Just the other day I found one of these with Roger’s tight, neat script adorning the title page. He’d written: “Finally finished the one I told you about.”
    There were many Rogers—but the one I began to know best was the elusive Roger. The one who left messages in books like messages in bottles, little threads that were tied to conversations. These were not inscriptions but rather encryptions, and Roger expected me to remember as much as he did. He remembered everything: names, dates, people, plots. A mathematical mind in the soul of a mage.
    In each of these small inscriptions I found some earthly or ethereal wisdom, an epiphany that uplifted me for days, weeks or months. Roger was instinctive about the needs of his friends, and he lavished this largesse of love, giving each and every one of us, his friends and extended family, something that we needed.
    For one man who played musical instruments in a band, Roger told all of his friends about this musical buddy, and, more importantly, he was there in the flesh to applaud when his friend performed. He met folksinger and sci-fi writer Will Sundown Sanders at a city coffeehouse where Will was playing, and Roger made sure all of his other friends knew about Will, his riffs, and his writing.
    In my case, Roger was clear and definite. “You need an agent,” he said one day, and he found me one. Shortly thereafter, I found myself with a top flight editor, a major publisher, and a contract—all of which might not have happened without Roger’s help. He also wrote a comment for my new book, comparing me to Carlos Castaneda and Philip K. Dick. Over the top, but what the heck…friends.
    When I thanked him for all of his help, Roger said, “All you need now is a notebook to put down your expenses and a Tax Pac to file your receipts, the rest will take