Roger Zelazny - This Moment Of The Storm

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Roger Zelazny. This Moment of the Storm

Back on Earth, my old philosophy prof--possibly because he'd misplaced

his lecture notes--came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his

sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied then, that

a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:

"What is a man?"

He had known exactly what he was doing. He'd had an hour and a

half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in

liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).

One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to

provide a strict biological classification.

The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and

asked:

"Is that all?"

And there was his hour and a half.

I learned that Man is a Reasoning Animal, Man is the One Who

Laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the

one who watches himself watching himself doing things he knows are

absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the

culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms,

loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and

the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz,

my roommate--which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment.

Wonder whatever became of Paul?)

Anyhow, to most of these I say "perhaps" or "partly, but--" or just

plain "crap!" I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance

to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan...

I'd said, "Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes

to do or not to do, and wishes he hadn't done, or hadn't."

Stop and think about it for a minute. It's purposely as general

as the others, but it's got room in it for the biology and the

laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the

love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the

door open for religion, you'll note. But it's limiting, too. Ever

met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?

Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan--delightful name.

Delightful place too, for quite awhile...

It was there that I saw Man's definitions, one by one, wiped from

off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.

...My radio had been playing more static than usual. That's all.

For several hours there was no other indication of what was to

come.

My hundred-thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that

clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and

lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading

western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and

umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway;

and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made

orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across

the shoulders of Saint Stephen's Range, some thirty miles distant, and

came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman

with a million buckets of paint--each of a different shade of green,

yellow, orange, blue and red--to daub with miles-wide brushes at its

heaving sea of growth.

Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is

emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt

and seamist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty

eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only

that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings

within my portable.

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It's funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always

women: You say, "She's a good old tub," or, "She's a fast, tough

number, this one," slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of

femininity that clings to the vessel's curves; or, conversely, "He's a

bastard to start, that Sam!" as you kick the auxiliary engine to an

inland transport-vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons,

and seas. Cities, though, are different. Generally, they're neuter.

Nobody calls New York or San Francisco "he" or "she". Usually, cities

are just "it".

Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex.

Usually, this is in the case of small cities near to the

Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is because of the

sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that vicinity, in

which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about

the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.

Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades

she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt

at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was

because she was what she was--a place of rest and repair, of

surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes,

weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big

night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is

seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon

light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is

Woman. The oldtime Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he

first spied port at the end of a voyage. _I_ felt it when I first saw

Beta Station-Betty-and the second time I saw her, also.

I am her Hell Cop.

...When six or seven of my hundred-thirty eyes flickered, then saw

again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it

was then that I began to feel uneasy.

I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girlvoice

told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early

evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal-vision.

Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged

ski-toads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.

I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and

without congestion, along Betty's prim, well-tended streets. Three

men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized

the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by.

All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay

upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the

airport, the spacer pads, and the surfaces of all the shopping

complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport-Vehicle

garages, crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond

like dark slugs, leaving tread-trails to mark their comings and goings

through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still

yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the

country houses, mainly simple A-frame affairs, were chisel blade,

spike-tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod, and

dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and

dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my

gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of

the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.

The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio.

Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.

My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.

I knew then that we were in for something.

I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen's at full speed,

which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range.

Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes

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Roger Zelazny - This Moment Of The Storm

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