The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 6

The Goatmen of Aguirra is one of my favorite stories and, based on comments, popular among my readers (thankee!). It appears in my self-published Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires, as an individual ebook The Goatmen of Aguirra: A Tale Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires, and was serialized in Piker Press in 2019.

I’m sharing it here because a friend is having some challenges using 1st Person POV, and The Goatmen of Aguirra uses 1st Person POV throughout.

Read The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 5.

Hope you enjoy.


The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 6)

 
795015:500 – We have not seen the Goatmen for four days, although the casters clearly showed them going into the brush on the steppes rising to the Towers. I’ve run several linguistic routines through the computers, but there wasn’t enough conversation to develop much lexicon, grammar, syntactical rules, etc.

Sanders just called me up. A Goatman is outside and the computers have identified him as Gomer. It is just as well. This morning Sanders handed me another communique from Robin, this one Private. I left it unopened on my desk.

795015:620 – He started in the standing talking posture. “Come to see our homes, Journeyer.”

So I was ‘Journeyer’. A name I could live with and one which made me laugh. Robin, I think, would agree with that name.

So be it! I would be ‘Journeyer’ and I would go with them. For once, I told myself, Robin could be right.

I mimicked their talking postures and said yes, I would come but had some things to do first. He’d have to wait until I returned.

His left hand came forward. “Just you. Not the others…” and again the program returned that impenetrable word.

“What others?” My first mistake. Just because they’re simplistic doesn’t mean they’re simple.

Gomer stood up straight and stationary. The only indication of life the occasional flecking of nictating membranes over his eyes and slight steam jetties rising from his nostrils. If he pawed the earth I would have run.

Slowly he leaned towards me and his left hand came forward. “The others like you who are in the home who wants to be a rock.” Then, as if weighted with finality, “Are there those like you other than those in the home who wants to be a rock?”


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