Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

And what of that ancient faith, he wondered. Why had mankind turned away from it? It had still existed in some measure in that day when the human race had been taken elsewhere. There still were traces of it in the early writings that his grandfather had made in the first of the record books. Perhaps it existed, in a slightly different context, among the Indians, although his contact with them never had revealed it. Some, perhaps all, of the young men formed secret symbolic associations with objects in the natural world, but it was questionable that this sort of behavior could be described as any sort of faith. It was something that was never talked about and so, naturally, he had only the most meager information on it.

The wrong people had been left behind, he thought. Given another segment of the population untouched by whatever agency had carried off the human race, and the ancient human faith might still be flourishing, perhaps stronger than it had ever been. But among his people and the other people who had been in the big house above the rivers on that fateful night, the faith already had been eroded, remaining as no more than a civilized convention to which they had conformed in a lukewarm manner. There had been a time, perhaps, when it had been meaningful. In the centuries after it had been conceived in all its glory, it had been allowed to fade, to become a shadow of its former force and strength.

It had been a victim of man's mismanagement, of his overwhelming concept of property and profit. It had been manifested in lordly buildings filled with pomp and glitter rather than being nourished in the human heart and mind. And now it came to this—that it was kept alive by beings that were not even human, machines that had been accorded a measure of seeming humanness purely as a matter of man's technology and pride.

He gained the ridgetop and noticed, now that the woods fell away and his view was clear, that the storm clouds were piling ever higher in the western sky and had engulfed the sun. The house lay ahead of him and he set out toward it at a somewhat more rapid rate than he was accustomed in his walking. He had opened the record book this morning and it was still lying open on his desk, but not written in. There had been nothing to write in it this morning, but now there would be much to write—the visit of Horace Red Cloud, the alien in the glen and its strange request, the wish of Evening Star to read the books and his invitation for her to come and live with him and Martha. He would get in some writing before the hour for dinner and after the evening concert would sit down at his desk again and finish his account of the happenings of the day.

The music trees were tuning up and there was one young sapling that was doing badly. Out back a robot blacksmith was hammering noisily on metal— more than likely he was working on a plow. Thatcher, he recalled, had told him that all the plowshares had been brought in for work against the coming of the spring and another planting season.

The door off the patio opened and Martha came out and down the path toward him. She was beautiful, he thought, watching her—more beautiful, in many ways, than that long-gone day when they had been married. Their life together had been good. A man couldn't ask for better. A warm glow of thankfulness for the fullness of their life surged through him.

"Jason," she cried, hurrying to meet him. "Jason, it is John! Your brother, John, is home!"

(Excerpt from journal entry of September 2, 2185)… I often wonder how it happened we were missed. If the People were taken away, which seems far more likely than that they simply went away, by what quirk of fortune or of fate were the people in this house missed by the agency which caused the taking? The monks and brothers in the monastery a mile down the road were taken. The people in the agricultural station, a fair-sized village in itself, a half mile farther off, were taken. The great apartment complex five miles up the river, housing the workers who fished the rivers, was emptied. We alone were left.

I sometimes wonder if the social and financial privilege which had been my family's lot for the last century or more may still have been operative—that we, somehow, were above being touched even by this supernatural agency, even as we remained untouched (nay, were even benefited) by the misery and the restriction and the want which overpopulation visited upon the people of the Earth. It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery. Not aware, perhaps, that they feed upon the misery, not with any wish of feeding on it—but they do.

It is retrospective guilt, of course, which forces me to wonder this and I know it can't be true, for there were many families other than our own which fattened on the misery and they were not spared. If spared is the word. We have no idea, of course, what the taking meant. It may have meant death, or it might, as well, have spelled transference to some other place, or to many other places, and if that is true, the transference may have been a blessing. For the Earth was not, in that day, the kind of place the majority of the people would have elected to remain. The entire surface of the land, and a part of the sea as well, and the entire output of energy were utilized to maintain a bare existence for the hordes that peopled Earth. Bare existence is no idle phrase, for the people barely had enough to eat, barely room enough to live, barely fabric enough to cover their bodies for the sake of decency.

That my family, and other similar families, were allowed the privilege of retaining the relatively large amounts of living space they had fashioned for themselves well before the population pinch became as bad as it eventually became, is only one example of the inequities that existed. That the Leech Lake Indian tribe, which also was missed by the supernatural agency, had been living in a relatively large and uncrowded space can be explained in another way. The land into which they had been forced, centuries before, was largely worthless land, although throughout the years the original tract had been taken from them, bit by bit, by the relentless force of economic pressure and eventually all of it would have been taken and they would have been shoved into the anonymity of the global ghetto. Although, truth to tell, their lives had been, in some ways, a ghetto from the start.

At the time of the disappearance, the building of this house and the acquisition of the estate which surrounds it would have been impossible. For one thing, no such tract could have been found and even had it been available its price would have been such that even the most affluent of the families would not have been able to afford it. Furthermore, there would not have been the labor force or the materials available to construct the house, for the world economy was stretched to the breaking point to maintain eight billion people.

My great-grandfather built this house almost a century and a half ago. Even then the land was hard to come by and he was only able to obtain it because the monastery down the road had fallen on hard times and was forced to sell a part of its holdings to meet certain pressing obligations. In building the house, my great-grandfather ignored all modern trends and went back to the solidity and simplicity of the great country houses of some centuries before. He built it well and he often said that it would stand forever and while this, of course, was an exaggeration, there is no question that it still will stand at a time when many other buildings have crumbled into mounds.

In our present situation we are fortunate to have such a house, so solid and so large. It even now accommodates the sixty-seven persons who are resident in it without any great inconvenience, although as our population grows we may have to look for other places where some of us can live. The habitations at the agricultural station now have fallen into disrepair, but the monastery buildings, much more stoutly built, are possibilities (and the four robots who now occupy them could make do with lesser space), and the great apartment complex up the river is another lesser possibility. The apartment buildings stand in some need of repair, having stood unoccupied all these fifty years, but our corps of robots, properly supervised, should be equal to the task.