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 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.