Winners!

by Poul Anderson

  Enthusiasm kindled in him. “That’s not the sole thing we’ll learn, either,” he went on. “They must have science of their own, a nonhuman science bom on a planet that isn’t Earth. Because they did observe us as profoundly as we’ve ever observed ourselves; they did mount a plan against us, one that would have taken another century or more to complete. Well, what else do they know? How do they support their civilization without visible agriculture or aboveground buildings or mines or anything? How can they breed whole new intelligent species to order? A million questions, ten million answers!”

  “Can we learn from them?” Barbro asked softly. “Or can we only overrun them as you say they fear?”

  Sherrinford halted, leaned elbow on mantel, hugged his pipe and replied, “I hope we’ll show more charity than that to a defeated enemy, It’s what they are. They tried to conquer us and failed, and now in a sense we are bound to conquer them, since they’ll have to make their peace with the civilization of the machine rather than see it rust away as they strove for. Still, they never did us any harm as atrocious as what we’ve inflicted on our fellow men in the past. And, I repeat, they could teach us marvelous things; and we could teach them, too, once they’ve learned to be less intolerant of a different way of life.”

  “I suppose we can give them a reservation,” she said, and didn’t know why he grimaced and answered so roughly: “Let’s leave them the honor they’ve earned! They fought to save the world they’d always known from that—” he made a chopping gesture at the city—“and just possibly we’d be better off ourselves with less of it.”

  He sagged a trifle and sighed, “However, I suppose if Elfland had won, man on Roland would at last—peacefully, even happily—have died away. We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?”

  Barbro shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “What?” He looked at her in a surprise that drove out melancholy. After a laugh: “Stupid of me. I’ve explained this to so many politicians and scientists and commissioners and Lord knows what, these past days, I forgot I’d never explained to you. It was a rather vague idea of mine, most of the time we were traveling, and I don’t like to discuss ideas prematurely. Now that we’ve met the Outlings and watched how they work, I do feel sure.”

  He tamped down his tobacco. “In limited measure,” he said, “I’ve used an archetype throughout my own working life. The rational detective. It hasn’t been a conscious pose—much—it’s simply been an image which fitted my personality and professional style. But it draws an appropriate response from most people, whether or not they’ve ever heard of the original. The phenomenon is not uncommon. We meet persons who, in varying degrees, suggest Christ or Buddha or the Earth Mother or, say, on a less exalted plane, Hamlet or d’Artagnan. Historical, fictional, and mythical, such figures crystallize basic aspects of the human psyche, and when we meet them in our real experience, our reaction goes deeper than consciousness.”

  He grew grave again: “Man also creates archetypes that are not individuals. The Anima, the Shadow—and, it seems, the Outworld. The world of magic, of glamour—which originally meant enchantment—of half-human beings, some like Ariel and some like Caliban, but each free of mortal frailties and sorrows—therefore, perhaps, a little carelessly cruel, more than a little tricksy; dwellers in dusk and moonlight, not truly gods but obedient to rulers who are enigmatic and powerful enough to be—Yes, our Queen of Air and Darkness knew well what sights to let lonely people see, what illusions to spin around them from time to time, what songs and legends to set going among them. I wonder how much she and her underlings gleaned from human fairy tales, how much they made up themselves, and how much men created all over again, all unwittingly, as the sense of living on the edge of the world entered them.”

  Shadows stole across the room. It grew cooler and the traffic noises dwindled. Barbro asked mutedly, “But what could this do?”

  “In many ways,” Sherrinford answered, “the outwayer is back in the Dark Ages. He has few neighbors, hears scanty news from beyond his horizon, toils to survive in a land he only partly understands, that may any night raise unforeseeable disasters against him, and is bounded by enormous wildernesses. The machine civilization which brought his ancestors here is frail at best. He could lose it as the Dark Ages nations had lost Greece and Rome, as the whole of Earth seems to have lost it. Let him be worked on, long, strongly, cunningly, by the archetypical Outworld, until he has come to believe in his bones that the magic of the Queen of Air and Darkness is greater than the energy of engines; and first his faith, finally his deeds will follow her. Oh, it wouldn’t happen fast. Ideally, it would happen too slowly to be noticed, especially by self-satisfied city people. But when in the end a hinterland gone back to the ancient way turned from them, how could they keep alive?”

  Barbro breathed, “She said to me, when their banners flew in the last of our cities, we would rejoice.”

  “I think we would have, by then,” Sherrinford admitted. “Nevertheless, I believe in choosing one’s destiny.”

  He shook himself, as if casting off a burden. He knocked the dottle from his pipe and stretched, muscle by muscle. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen.”

  She looked straight at him. “Thanks to you.”

  A flush went up his thin cheeks. “In time, I’m sure, somebody else would have—What matters is what we do next, and that’s too big a decision for one individual or one generation to make.”

  She rose. “Unless the decision is personal, Eric,” she suggested, feeling heat in her own face.

  It was curious to see him shy. “I was hoping we might meet again.”

  “We will.”

  Ayoch sat on Wolund’s Barrow. Aurora shuddered so brilliant, in such vast sheafs of light, as almost to hide the waning moons. Firethorn blooms had fallen; a few still glowed around the tree roots, amidst dry brok which crackled underfoot and smelled like woodsmoke. The air remained warm, but no gleam was left on the sunset horizon.

  “Farewell, fare lucky,” the pook called. Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream never looked back. It was as if they didn’t dare. They trudged on out of sight, toward the human camp whose lights made a harsh new star in the south.

  Ayoch lingered. He felt he should also offer good-by to her who had lately joined him that slept in the dolmen. Likely none would meet here again for loving or magic. But he could only think of one old verse that might do. He stood and trilled:

  “Out of her breast

  a blossom ascended.

  The summer burned it.

  The song is ended.”

  Then he spread his wings for the long flight away.

  The End

  *****************************

  Goat Song,

  by Poul Anderson

  F&SF Feb. 1972

  Novelette - 12691 words

  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 sonic eternal clock. The shrubs whisper to the wind.

  Elsewhere the ridges around me are wooded, alive with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. The sky is huge, the westering sun wanbright. The valley is filling with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches roy 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 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 sun 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 aircars 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. We 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 viewall, 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 be 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. Since then I have been hard put not to hate Thrakia.

  This evening, even without so much sundown light, I would not make that mistake. Nothing but the silvery bracelet about her left wrist bespeaks the past we share. She is in wildcountry 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 smudges 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. (O 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 must have been chosen out of the whole world. Your girl, what was she? Nobody!”

  “To me, she was everybody.”

  “You—” Thrakia catches her lip in her teeth. One hand reaches out and closes on my bare forearm, a hard hot touch, the grimy fingernails biting. When I make no response, she lets go and stares at the ground. A V of outbound geese passes overhead. Their cries come shrill through the wind, which is loudening in the forest.

  “Well,” she says, “you are special. You always were. You went to space and came back, with the Great Captain. You’re maybe the only man alive who understands about the ancients. And your singing, yes, you don’t really entertain, your songs trouble people and can’t be forgotten. So maybe She will listen to you. But SUM won’t. It can’t give special resurrections. Once that was done, a single time, wouldn’t it have to be done for everybody? The dead would overrun the living.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “In any event, I mean to try.”

  “Why can’t you wait for the promised time? Surely, then, SUM will re-create you two in the same generation.”

  “I’d have to live out this life, at least, without her,” I say, looking away also, down to the highroad which shines through shadow like death’s snake, the length of the valley. “Besides, how do you know there ever will be any resurrections? We have only a promise. No, less than that. An announced policy.”

  She gasps, steps back, raises her hands as if to fend me off. Her soul bracelet casts light into my eyes. I recognize an embryo exorcism. She lacks ritual; every “superstition” was patiently scrubbed out of our metal-and-energy world, long ago. But if she has no word for it, no concept, nevertheless she recoils from blasphemy.

  So I say, wearily, not wanting an argument, wanting only to wait here alone:

  “Never mind. There could be some natural catastrophe, like a giant asteroid striking, that wiped out the system before conditions had become right for resurrections to commence.”

  “That’s impossible,” she says, almost frantic. “The homeostats, the repair functions——”

  “All right, call it a vanishingly unlikely theoretical contingency. Let’s declare that I’m so selfish I want Swallow Wing back now, in this life of mine, and don’t give a curse whether that’ll be
fair to the rest of you.”

  You won’t care either, anyway, I think. None of you. You don’t grieve. It is your own precious private consciousnesses that you wish to preserve; no one else is close enough to you to matter very much. Would you believe me if I told you I am quite prepared to offer SUM my own death in exchange for It releasing Blossom-in-the-Sun?

  I don’t speak that thought, which would be cruel, nor repeat what is crueller: my fear that SUM lies, that the dead never will he disgorged. For (I am not the All-Controller, I think not with vacuum and negative energy levels but with ordinary begotten molecules; yet I can reason somewhat dispassionately, being disillusioned) consider—The object of the game is to maintain a society stable, just, and sane. This requires satisfaction not only of somatic, but of symbolic and instinctual needs. Thus children must be allowed to come into being. The minimum number per generation is equal to the maximum: that number which will maintain a constant population.

  It is also desirable to remove the fear of death from men. Hence the promise:

  At such time as it is socially feasible, SUM will begin to refashion us, with our complete memories but in the pride of our youth. This can be done over and over, life after life across the millennia. So death is, indeed, a sleep.