Roger Zelazny. This Moment of the Storm
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. 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 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.