This Moment of the Storm

By Roger Zelazny

Godfrey Justin Holmes is a man out of time running from his past. Two trips to two worlds had broken the bond with his times. But a hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness-not when you cheat time with the petite mort of the cold sleep. Time's vengeance is memory, and though for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear of sound, when you awaken your past is still with you. He had started running because of a girl buried on another world.

Almost 600 years later Holmes is a Hell Cop on Tierra del Cygnus. It's his job to protect the people of Betty (short for Beta Station) from the hostilities of their colony world. The mother of all city wrecking storm is headed right towards his adopted home and it's up to him to do what ever he can to mitigate the coming disaster. Both the storm and his past come crashing down on him making his task almost impossible.

Roger Zelazny was a science fiction and fantasy writer, a six time Hugo Award winner, and a three time Nebula Award Winner. He published more than forty novels in his lifetime. His first novel This Immortal, serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under the title ...And Call Me Conrad, won the Hugo Award for best novel. Lord of Light, his third novel, also won the Hugo award and was nominated for the Nebula award. He died at age 58 from cancer. Zelazny was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781515462330

Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny burst onto the SF scene in the early 1960s with a series of dazzling and groundbreaking short stories. He is the winner of six Hugo Awards, including for the novels This Immortal and the classic Lord of Light; he is also the author of the enormously popular Amber series, starting with Nine Princes in Amber. In addition to his Hugos, he went on to win three Nebula Awards over the course of a long and distinguished career. He died on June 14, 1995.

Book preview

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This Moment of the Storm

Roger Zelazny

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This Moment of the Storm

Roger Zelazny

©2024 Amber Ltd.

This Moment of the Storm is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

ISBN 13: 9781515462330

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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 had 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