Roger Zelazny - This Moment Of The Storm.pdf - Roger Zelazny - margozap

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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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for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full

charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.

I entered the Mayor's outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist,

and glanced at the inner door.

"Mayor in?" I asked.

I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy, but

well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this

wasn't one of the occasions.

"Yes," she said, returning to the papers on her desk.

"Alone?"

She nodded, and her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark

complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she'd fix her

hair and use more makeup. Well...

I crossed to the door and knocked.

"Who?" asked the Mayor.

"Me," I said, opening it, "Godfrey Justin Holmes--`God' for short.

I want someone to drink coffee with, and you're elected."

She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been

studying, and her blonde-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in

the middle, gave a little stir as she turned--like a sunshot snowdrift

struck by sudden winds.

She smiled and said, "I'm busy."

`Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears--I love them all'--from an

anonymous Valentine I'd sent her two months previous, and true.

"...But not too busy to have coffee with God," she stated. "Have

a throne, and I'll make us some instant."

I did, and she did.

While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I'd

borrowed from her canister, and remarked, "Looks like rain."

"Uh-huh," she said.

"Not just making conversation," I told her. "There's a bad storm

brewing somewhere--over Saint Stephen's, I think. I'll know real

soon."

"Yes grandfather," she said, bringing me my coffee. "You old

timers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather

Central, it's an established fact. I won't argue."

She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.

I set my cup on the edge of her desk.

"Just wait and see," I said. "If it makes it over the mountains,

it'll be a nasty high-voltage job. It's already jazzing up

reception."

Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure.

She'd be forty in the fall, but she'd never completely tamed her

facial reflexes--which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned.

Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the

sort of child she'd been by looking at her, listening to her now. The

thought of being forty was bothering her again, too, I could tell.

She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.

See, I'm around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior

by a bit, but she'd heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a

kid, before I came back again this last time. I'd filled out the

balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta's first mayor,

Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born about five

hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five

hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts

between the stars. I've made a few more trips than a few others;

consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as

old as I look--but still, people always seem to feel that I've cheated

somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most

disconcerting...

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"Eleanor," said I, "your term will be up in November. Are you

still thinking of running again?"

She took off her narrow, elegantly-trimmed glasses and brushed her

eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.

"I haven't made up my mind."

"I ask not for press-release purposes," I said, "but for my own."

"Really, I haven't decided," she told me. "I don't know..."

"Okay, just checking. Let me know if you do."

I drank some coffee.

After a time, she said, "Dinner Saturday? As usual?"

"Yes, good."

"I'll tell you then."

"Fine--capital."

As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring

into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see

the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.

She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.

"A bad storm?" she asked me.

"Yep. Feel it in my bones."

"Tell it to go away?"

"Tried. Don't think it will, though."

"Better batten some hatches, then."

"It wouldn't hurt and it might help."

"The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour.

You'll have something sooner?"

"Think so. Probably any minute."

I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.

"Let me know right away what it is."

"Check. Thanks for the coffee."

Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.

Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its

tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds

boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen's. The mountain

range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline. Beyond it, the

waters were troubled.

My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a

cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:

Gray, and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside,

that's what I saw.

...And advancing.

I called Eleanor.

"It's gonna rain, chillun," I said.

"Worth some sandbags?"

"Possibly."

"Better be ready then. Okay. Thanks."

I returned to my watching.

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

both the planet and its sole continent.

How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size;

actually, a bit smaller, and more watery. --As for the main landmass,

first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the

right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a

counter-clockwise direction and push it up into the northern

hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull.

Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the

middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the

equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics,

partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you're about it,

break Australia into eight pieces and drop them after the first eight

letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each

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pole, and don't forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before

you leave. Thanks.

I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others

turned toward Saint Stephen's until the cloudbanks breasted the range

about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had

passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an

extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up

quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse

just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven's artillery. But then

there are the bad ones--sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing

more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.

Betty's position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its

advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the

gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles

removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty

does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are

almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in

length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and

running roughly parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty

percent of the 100,000 population is concentrated about the business

district, five miles in from the river.

We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the

highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter

feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor

in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our

proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine

other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and

three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital

of a potential country.

We're a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop-boats from

orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future

growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the

continent. Our original _raison d'etre_, though, was Stopover,

repair-point, supply depot, and refreshment stand, physical and

psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, further

along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others--it just

happened that way--and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence,

the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite

primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population:land

scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth

century in the American southwest--at least for purposes of getting

started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system,

although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.

Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the way between the stars?

Think about it a while, and I'll tell you later if you're right.

The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers

this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint

Stephen's was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their

necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled

upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.

I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after

lunch, so I knew it wasn't my stomach.

Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a

big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.

There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow

down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise

fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then

there were drops upon the windowpane, then rivulets.

Flint-like, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen's scraped its belly

and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into

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