The Goatmen of Aguirra – Page 2 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 9

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 8.

Hope you enjoy.

The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 9)

815015:0800 – The recorder signaled The Merrimack’s request for my immediate return sometime during my study of the black root. Has my intention for participant observation caused Sanders concern? Has Robin conscripted my pay for this rigging and Sanders needs my consent before he’ll approve? Damn him, By-the-Book Sanders. For the first time in years I feel useful, like I’m accomplishing something, and I’ll be damned if any petty squabbles will keep it from me now.

I had not noticed before, but some of the billies are not in the village. Have they gone back to inspect “the home who wants to be a rock”? Is this Sanders’ concern?

835015:1700 – No entries yesterday. It seems I slept. Gomer tells me this is common for those first exposed to the Wa’asis, the proper name of the black root. He also tells me we didn’t get to the Theisen. I could not make the journey, he said, something which is also common. When I asked why he said nothing.

More of the Goatmen have left this village, some even as I enter this, and I note that the majority of those leaving are the young ones. Regarding that, several of the females are pregnant and, Gomer tells me, will start kidding soon. I asked him if there are any natural abortions or stillborns and he answered no, but not directly. There are no words in his language for either stillborn or abortion. This is the strongest evidence such things don’t exist.

I’ve also asked about natural predators. The lowlands have several, he tells me. Original planetary findings confirm this. “Is that why your people came here to live?”

“No, we have always been here.”

I haven’t as yet heard any of their oral tradition or myths – if indeed they have any. I’m sure they would be fascinating.

This opens our discussion again to Tenku and I question him about the Wa’asis. Whatever it is, only Tenku and a few others have it and administer it. What happens when these others are no more? Then one like them will chew it. “Will you chew it?” He has no answer.

This brings up another point. Are these the only goatmen on all of Aguirra? Where are the other “tribes”?

I ask about the Goatman – here again Gomer laughs at “Goat Man”. He butts me but this time knows I’m delicate and it is a tap, barely felt yet frightening never-the-less – the individual who stared at me when we sent out the rumbler.

Gomer tells me no such person – Goatman – exists. I describe the individual in detail and he asks me to go on, to tell him more. It is here I realize something else about these Goatmen and perhaps all aboriginals I’ve ever known.

The Goatmen’s observational skills are based on a delicate yet pervasive matrix of focused attention directed to minute detail, the constant exercise of a rich cultural memory, and the predication of all experience into oral history. This latter is prevalent in all pre-ecririen societies. This could be true of all aboriginal peoples but I have no way of knowing.

845015:0430 – Gomer has returned with Tenku. Tenku asks me to tell him who I saw with the other People when they came to the Blind.

It is not that he’s dissatisfied with my description, it’s simply that he feels there is more. He doesn’t question what I’ve told him, only asks “Where are you?”

“I am here.”

Quickly, he lifts me. I think he is old and still he demonstrates formidable strength. Holding me against him, I smell his scent quite strongly. It is the same and subtly different from the others and the community smell I’d gotten used to. He smells, I realize, of the Wa’asis. His breath is sweet with the stuff, and being this close it is intoxicating.

“Where are you?” he asks me.

“I am here, I told you.”

He put me down. Something strange happened then, something I’d noticed but had not referenced in this work before.

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The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 8

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 7.

Hope you enjoy.

The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 8)

805015:0800 – A brief walk around the village reveals little. There are no family dwellings as such, although there are some common constructions. The one I was in is evidently for the sick and infirmed. One seems to house foodstuffs. I have not ascertained what the others are for in detail, although it seems one is a common sleeping hut. All are marvelously constructed to withstand the elements, as are the goatmen themselves. Perhaps their physiology precludes the need for dwellings. Even so, I would think that over time they’d come to prefer them.

Which brings up an interesting detail. I asked Gomer what they call themselves. His nostrils flared and released, flared and released, as if beating with his heart. With each flaring he gave a name. He was signaling them by scent, I believe, and perhaps expecting me to be able to do the same, much as we would point to one person after another.

“No, no,” I said. “What are you named all together?”

His level of confusion demonstrated there was none. Again, if I were a xenopologist I would have expected that. This also demonstrates there are no other sentients on the planet, I think. If there were others, wouldn’t the Goatmen have developed the language to separate themselves from these hypothetical others? Or is this my prejudice placed upon them, By-the-Book Sanders versus Not-By-the-Book me.

Or perhaps there are no other intelligences who have revealed themselves to the Goatmen.

I then told him what we called ourselves – “human” – and his left hand shot forward. “How many of you are there?”

I told him I didn’t know.

“There are enough so you don’t know each one?”

“Oh, most definitely.”

“And all of you are in the home who wants to be a rock?”

He waited for my answer.

Damn my lies. Damn them. Damn Robin. Damn Sanders, Tellweiller, Galen, and Nash. Damn the Goatmen.

“Oh, I misunderstood before. No, many of us are in the …” and I used that word.

He brayed, something which the translators evaluated as laughter, and gave me a gentle butt. I am sure it was gentle for him. It damn near cracked my skull. “Go on.”

They know when I lie. Perhaps my scent gives me away. Yet the gentle reproof. Am I teaching them that some stories can be fun?

I told him we call them “Goatmen”. What he heard was “Goat Men” and he laughed again.

“Can half a people hope to survive?” he asked, still laughing.

The last thing I remember was him giving me another gentle butt. Soon after I slept.

The village is multi-generational from what I’ve seen so far and the divisions are fascinating in themselves. I wonder if these creatures come into a mating season, still tied to some ecologic bio-rhythm, so clearly are the generations demarcated.

Lactating females seem to have longer hair, or perhaps they simply haven’t shed their winter hairs as easily as do the males and non-lactating females, of which there are few. Around the nipples of some lactating females there is a bloody stain. Perhaps some of the kids don’t give up the tit soon enough.

Closest to me is one female still suckling a young. There is a tenderness common to all sentient creatures between parent and young – and yes, I’m aware of my many assumptions.

I surmise I’m witnessing a parent and child simply by the interaction between them. It reminds me of Robin nursing and nuzzling Jeremy. There was a tenderness between them which did not extend to me, often intentionally excluding me.

I remember, there was one time, I watched her holding him crooked in her right arm, unbuttoning her blouse and folding it down, then pinching her nipple as he rooted back and forth, his little mouth open and reaching, until he found her. His eyes slowly closed as she sang to him, almost too quiet for me to hear. Once she was secure he had found her milk, her eyes, like his, slowly closed.

She rocked then, rocked in rhythm to her song, and his mouth went lax without ever loosing her teat, every now and again his cheeks would tense and he would suck, perhaps six or seven times. She would smile and then he would sleep again.

That these creatures are sentient there can be no doubt. They have long since passed Keiger’s Porpoise Test – another anthropomorphic egocentrism, if you ask me. Twentieth century sociologists learned to be participant observers to best understand a culture. Agreed! Goodbye Robin, farewell Jeremy, my son. Sanders, you were my commander, never my superior, even as an officer. To Tellweiller, Nash, and Galen, serve him as best you can if not at all.

The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 7

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 6.

Hope you enjoy.

The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 7)

805015:700 – I am exhausted. Gomer could no doubt have made the trip from the blind to the top of Alpha Tower in an hour, maybe two. Rarely have I seen an animal so uniquely adapted to its environment. Because of me the trip took a little over a day, and I’m considered in good shape.

Gomer led me up and away from the blind in what I think was a slow pace for him. As the incline increased, he dropped to all fours and moved like a North American billy high in the Canadian Rockies. His toes act exactly as flattening rubber pads, thick soled and slightly prehensile, that spread and grab the rocks for support and balance. Walking bipedally, it wasn’t unusual to see him leap against a rock wall, one foot flatten against it like a hiking boot and filling minute crevices to obtain purchase, and push off and forward with his other foot literally grabbing an outcropping which normally would block the way. All this and maintaining forward locomotion! At another point he had gone around a rivel ahead of me. When I came around he was suspended upside down from an upper ridge with no apparent support. His attention seemed fixed on the steppes leading to the other Tower.

I gasped and his attention was broken. I heard two pops and he fell – a drop of several meters – twisting in the air like a cat and righting himself. The place where he “stood” under the ridge was moist but evaporating quickly, and there was moisture under his footprints now as he walked. It was then I noticed the extremely pronounced musculature and venous markings between his knee and ankle and ankle and pads, markings and musculature which previously hadn’t been apparent. I’m guessing these creatures have evolved the ability to control the contour of the soles of their feet and excrete a mucous, thus creating a suction cup.

He looked towards Beta Tower. “Tomorrow,” by which he meant today, “they begin their Passage.”

The climb only grew more arduous and I told Gomer to stop often. He didn’t seem bothered by this. Perhaps he considers me a juvenile?

A curious thing did happen, once. I started to slip and Gomer stared at me. I flailed at the edge. Suddenly he was between me and the precipice, gently butting me back into the direction I should travel, his butting as gentle as a mother covering her young in a blanket yet as forceful as a cat chastising her kits. From that point on he always walked between me and the fall line of the Tower. When the path wouldn’t support two abreast he fell to all fours and moved over the edge until more trailspace became available and he could again join me on the path. One could believe they evolved from quadripedal spiders until you see their eyes.

Later, at a particularly difficult pass for a biped, I told him I could go no further. He sat and, of course, stared. Eventually I could draw a breath without rasping. My legs, I knew, would ache for several days due to the lactic acid build-up in them. In addition, the rarified air was forcing me to hyperventilate in order to force enough oxygen into my system and I was starting to feel the cold through my suit.

I looked up at him, silhouetted by the setting sun, the sky clear above but a gentle mist settling over the Tower. On three sides of us were gray crags and skettles of rock. Underfoot and in occasional mounds were bluish green scrub plants. To the other side was the high plains of Aguirra and, far away and below, the lowlands were the colony would one day be. A wind blew, smelling of O₃ and summer storms and my attention went back to him. As the wind blew, his fur ruffled and filled, swirling around him and protecting him, bleeding away the cold the way a hirsute man’s pelt bleeds away water as he rises from the sea. All the while his impassive, immutable face stared down at me, the only change in it being the nictating membranes that covered his eyes when the winds blew directly into them.

I saw myself clearly in his eyes, then as if surrounded by clouds and mists when the membranes came over them, then clear again, and wondered how he saw me.

The winds started to grow more violent and I realized that, indeed, another storm would soon be pummeling the altiplano and all that grew out of it. What oxygen I had been able to glean before seemed to be robbed from me as the pressure dropped and the winds increased. The pain in my lungs was tremendous as they struggled to ventilate me, my blood to irrigate me. My heart began pounding in response to my body’s demand for more oxygen.

Why hadn’t I thought to bring O₂ shells with me? I could feel my vessels dilating within me to carry rich red life where it was needed and my brain felt as if overcome with fever as oxygen starvation took hold.
Continue reading “The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 7”

The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 6

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?”

The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 5

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 4.

Hope you enjoy.

The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 5)

755015:500 – Sanders consented to an attempt at open communications. Aside from the robotics and the collar, I’ll be going alone. I suggested a holo for first contact, in case these creatures are hostile. Policy and the others went against my suggestion, and I was selected as Odd-man-out. No robotics indicated anything like these Goatmen, so no xenopologists were assigned to this crew.

This isn’t what I was trained to do and I don’t like it.

755015:940 – When they saw me walk around the Blind, all immediately lowered themselves to their knees with their arms at their sides and hands on thighs, fingers pointing inward, their backs straight and their faces always towards me. I felt like I was entering an Aikido class. The way their arms arc out from their bodies I can only think of “I’m a little teapot short and stout…”. Jeremy so loved that song. I would sing it to him and dance, positioning his little body to the lyrics of the song. Ah, well.

As I approached, in unison they held out their left hands and bent slightly towards me. One of the Goatmen communicated. The communication was audial, but was in the infrasound range as I felt it more than heard it, like feeling the vibrations of a big bass drum as a parade marches by. The vibrations stopped and, again in unison, they extended their right hands, still bent slightly in my direction. I was told by a friend from Nambia that most white men smell like goats. The wind has changed and, if this is how we smell, we should bathe more often.

If they used audial communication, I would try the same, hoping my voice was neither beyond their hearing nor painful to their ears.

“My name is Gordon Banks.”

They communicated amongst themselves, this time in the audible range. What I immediately noticed was the physical cues to communication. When one spoke, he leaned towards his listener and extended his left hand, then showed he awaited a reply by extending his right hand. The listener kept his back straight until he spoke. During conversation – as opposed to communication – both leaned into each other and their hands darted forward and back quickly but rhythmically. During oration (if that term can be applied) the listeners sit with their backs straight. The patterns for conversation and communication followed when more than two Goatmen were engaged.

I remember that my reaction to their physical cuing was the amount of respect it showed for speaker and listener. I wondered if this physical cuing was ceremonial or cultural.

Their voices remind me most of excited horses and sheep, a combination of high bleating, neighing, and low bellowing. It is obviously a complex language. As they went through their posturings the wind brought several subtle smells to me. Could there also be an vomeronasal component to their communication? How I wished for a Goatman’s nose! Is the grotesque physical animation necessary due to the torpidity of the face? Does their vomeronasal sense supplement that? And if so, how subtle and sophisticated is it?

Why did none of the robotics reveal this culture here? Why are there no other such creatures or cultures anywhere else on this planet?

They extended their left hands again (a sign of placation or offering?) and bent towards me. When the one Goatman – I’ve decided to call him Gomer, it is as close as I can get to his name – spoke, I tied in the translators. He is, I think, a middle-aged male of some importance. “You are from the …” He made a sound at the end of his question that the program couldn’t translate.

Again their right hands came forward. All stared at me, waiting. I spoke into the collar, “Can the computers give me anything on that last phoneme?”

Sanders answered me, although I could hear the others in the background and imagined them all huddled around the holo watching and taking notes. “Something tied to their mythology is the best we can do. Some kind of primary cultural icon, we think.”

I wanted to echo “We think?” but know Sanders was incapable of an original thought unless the flight manual expressly indicated it. Instead I said, “Thanks. I’m talking with fifteenth-century Christians and am about to say, ‘Jesus Christ? Holy Spirit? Sorry, I have no idea what those are.’ I hope their culture is more aboriginal.”

I tied in the translators and spoke. “Can you understand me?”