Poul Anderson - Goat Boy

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Poul Anderson

Foul Anderson (1926— ) has written over sixty novels and published over forty collections of short

stories in his long and influential career in science fiction. James Blish called Anderson “the

enduring explosion” because of the high quality of his continuing literary production.

Distinguished as a fantasy writer (The Broken Sword was his first adult novel) and a mystery

writer (his first mystery, Perish By the Sword , won the Cock Robin prize), he is nevertheless

principally one of the heroic figures of hard science fiction. While a devotee of the hard science

approach of Hal Clement, he is given to making his stories vehicles for philosophical and social

commentary, in the manner of Heinlein.

Anderson has always defended the traditions of military honor in his fiction, and devoted

much of his effort to adventure plots. But he has also turned out a number of colorful, powerful

SF stories and novels, from Brain Wave (1954) to The Boat of a Million Years (1989), that are

generally perceived as his major works—the most famous is probably Tau Zero (1970). These are

marked by astronomical and physical speculation and large-scale Stapledonian vistas of time and

space. Even in his swashbuckling adventure stories, Anderson is famous for beginning with

calculations of the elements of the orbit of the world to be his setting. and allowing the

physics, chemistry, and biology to follow logically, thus generating the parameters in which human

beings would have to live and survive.

He is also interested in mythology and often uses myth in his fiction, as in this story.

“Goat Song,” from the 1970s, is one of his many Hugo Award-winning stories, hard science fiction

with an overlay of mythic fantasy.

GOAT SONG

Three women: one is dead; one is alive; One is both and neither, and will never live and

never die, being immortal in SUM.

On a hill above that valley through which runs the highroad, I await Her passage. I’rost

came early this year, and the grasses have paled. Otherwise the slope is begrown with blackberry

bushes that have been harvested by men and birds, leaving only briars, and with certain apple

trees. They are very old, those trees, survivors of an orchard raised by generations which none

hut SUM now remembers (I can see a few fragments of wall thrusting above the brambles)— scattered

crazily over the hillside and as crazily gnarled. A little fruit remains on them. Chill across my

skin, a gust shakes loose an apple. I hear it knock on the earth, another stroke of sonic eternal

clock. The shrubs whisper to the wind.

Elsewhere the ridges around mc are wooded, abre with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. ‘I

he sky is huge, the westering sun wanbright. The valley is hlling

with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches roy nostrils. This is Indian summer, tIm

funeral pyre of the year.

There have been other seasons. There have been other lifetimes, before mine and hers; and

ni those days they had words to sing with. We still allow ourselves music, though, and I have

spent much time planting melodies around my rediscovered words. “In the greenest growth of the May-

time—” I unsling the harp on my back, and tune it afresh, and sing it to her, straight into autumn

and the waning day.

“—You came, and the son came after, And the green grew golden above:

And the flag-flowers lightened with laughter, And the meadowsweet shook with love.”

A footfall stirs the grasses, quite gently, and the woman says, trying to chuckle, “Why,

thank you.”

Once, so soon after my one’s death that I was still dazed by it, I stood in the home that

had been ours. This was on the hundred and first floor of a most desirable building. After dark

the city flamed for us, blinked, glittered, flung immense sheets of radiance forth like banners.

Nothing but SUM could have controlled the firefly dance of a million airears among the towers: or,

for that matter, have maintained the entire city, from nuclear powerplants through automated

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factories, physical and economic distribution networks, sanitation, repair, services, education,

culture, order, everything as one immune immortal organism. \Ve had gloried in belonging to this

as well as to each other.

But that night I told the kitchen to throw the dinner it had made for me down the waste

chute, and ground under my heel the chemical consolations which the medicine cabinet extended to

me, and kicked the cleaner as it picked up the mess, and ordered the lights not to go on, anywhere

in our suite. I stood by the vie\Vall, looking out across megalopolis, and it was tawdry. In my

hands I had a little clay figure she had fashioned herself. I turned it over and over and over.

But I had forgotten to forbid the door to admit visitors. It recognized this woman and

opened for her. She had come with the kindly intention of teasing me out of a mood that seemed to

her unnatural. I heard her enter, and looked around through the gloom. She had almost the same

height as my girl did, and her hair chanced to he bound in a way that my girl often favored, and

the figurine dropped from my grasp and shattered, because for an instant I thought she was my

girl. Smee then I have been bard put not to hate Thrakia.

This evening, even without so much sundown light, I would not make that mistake. Nothing

hut the silvery bracelet about her left wrist bespeaks the past we share. She is in wildeountry

garb: boots, kilt of true fur and belt of true leather, knife at hip and rifle slung on shoulder.

Her locks are matted and snarled, her skin brown from weeks of weather; scratches and sniudges

show beneath the fantastic zigzags she has painted in many colors on herself. She wears a necklace

of bird skulls.

Now that one who is dead was, in her own way, more a child of trees and horizons than

Thrakia’s followers. She was so much at home in the open that she had no need to put off clothes

or cleanliness, reason or gentleness, when we sickened of the cities and went forth beyond them.

From this trait I got many of the names I bestowed on her, such as Wood’s Colt or Fallow Hind or,

from

my prowlings among ancient books, Dryad and Elven. (She liked me to choose her names, and this

pleasure had no end, because she was inexhaustible.)

I let my harpstring ring into silence. Turning about, I say to Thrakia, “I wasn’t singing

for you. Not for anyone. Leave me alone.”

She draws a breath. The wind ruffles her hair and brings me an odor of her:

not female sweetness, but fear. She clenches her fists and says, “You’re crazy.”

“Wherever did you find a meaningful word like that?” I gibe; for my own pain and—to be

truthful—my own fear must strike out at something, and here she stands. “Aren’t you content any

longer with ‘untranquil’ or ‘disequilibrated’?”

“I got it from you,” she says defiantly, “you and your damned archaic songs. There’s

another word, ‘damned.’ And how it suits you! When are you going to stop this morbidity?”

“And commit myself to a clinic and have my brain laundered nice and sanitary? Not soon,

darling.” I use that last word aforethought, but she cannot know what scorn and sadness are in it

for me, who know that once it could also have been a name for my girl. The official grammar and

pronunciation of language is as frozen as every other aspect of our civilization, thanks to

electronic recording and neuronic teaching; but meanings shift and glide about like subtle

serpents. (0 adder that stung my Foalfoot!)

I shrug and say in my driest, most city-technological voice, “Actually, I’m the practical,

nonmorbid one. Instead of running away from my emotions—via drugs, or neuroadjustment, or playing

at savagery like you, for that matter—I’m about to implement a concrete plan for getting back the

person who made me happy.”

“By disturbing Her on Her way home?”

“Anyone has the right to petition the dark Queen while she’s abroad on earth.”

“But this is past the proper time—”

“No law’s involved, just custom. People are afraid to meet Her outside a crowd, a town,

bright flat lights. They won’t admit it, but they arc. So I came here precisely not to be part of

a queue. I don’t want to speak into a recorder for subsequent computer analysis of my words. How

could I be sure She was listening? I want to meet Her as myself, a unique being, and look in Her

eyes while I make my prayer.”

Thrakia chokes a little. “She’ll be angry.”

“Is She able to be angry, anymore?”

“I. . . I don’t know. What you mean to ask for is so impossible, though. So absurd. That

SUM should give you back your girl. You know It never makes exceptions.”

“Isn’t She Herself an exception?”

“That’s different. You’re being silly. SUM has to have a, well, a direct human liaison.

Emotional and cultural feedback, as well as statistics. How else can It govern rationally? And She

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