Homeward and beyond - Anderson, Poul, 1926- by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

GOAT

SONG

By way of contrast to the foregoing, here is a story which on the one hand uses ancient motifs in the fantasy tradition, and on the other hand is strict science fiction in the sense of using no concept that the most conservative scientist could say is theoretically impossible. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anything in it is even technologically impossible. That scares me.

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. Frost 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 but 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 some eternal clock. The shrubs whisper to the wind.

Elsewhere the ridges around me are wooded, afire with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. The sky is huge, the westering sun wan-bright. The valley is filling with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches my nostrils. This is Indian summer, the funeral pyre of the year.

There have been other seasons. There have been other lifetimes, before mine and hers; and in 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 Maytime—” I unsling the harp on my back, and tune it afresh, and sing to her, straight into autumn and the waning day.

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