Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

Our livelihood is well taken care of, for we have simply taken over as much as we need of the great expanse of farmland formerly worked by the agricultural station. The robots form a work force that is fully equal to the situation and as the agricultural machines broke down beyond the possibility of repair, we have gone back to farming with horses for motive power and to the simple plow, mower and reaper, which our robots have built by cannibalizing the more modern and sophisticated implements.

We are now on what I like to think of as a manorial basis—the manor providing all those things of which we have any need. We have great flocks of sheep for wool and mutton, a dairy herd for milk, beef cattle for meat, hogs for pork and ham and bacon, poultry for eggs and eating, bees and cane for honey and for sorghum, grains for flour and extensive gardens to furnish a great array of vegetables. It is a simple existence and a quiet and most satisfactory one. There were times, to start with, when we missed the old life—or at least some of the younger people missed it, but now I believe that all of us are convinced that, in its way, the life that we have fashioned is a most satisfactory one.

I have one deep regret. I have wished many times that my son, Jonathan, and his lovely wife, Marie, the parents of our three grandchildren, might have lived to be here with us. The two of them, I know, would have enjoyed the life that we live now. As a boy Jonathan never wearied of tramping over the estate. He loved the trees and flowers, the few wild creatures that managed to still exist in our little patch of woodland, the free and uncluttered feeling that a little open space could give. Now the world (or all of it I know, and I suppose the rest of it) is going back into wilderness. Trees are growing on the old farmlands. Grass has crept into places where no grass had grown before. The wild flowers are corning back and spreading from the little, forgotten nooks where they had hidden out, and the wildlife is taking over. The river valleys, now fairly heavily wooded, swarm with squirrel and coon and occasionally there are deer, probably drifting down out of the north. I know of five covey of quail that are doing well and the other day I ran into a flock of grouse. Once again the migratory wildfowl each spring and fall fly in great Vs across the sky. With man's heavy hand lifted off the Earth the little, humble creatures are coming back into an olden heritage. With certain modifications, the situation is analogous to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous. The one important modification, of course, is that all the dinosaurs became extinct and there are a few humans still surviving. I may, however, be coming to a conclusion concerning this modification somewhat early. Triceratops, it is believed, may have been the last of the dinosaurs to disappear and it is entirely possible that small herds of Triceratops may have dragged out an existence spanning perhaps half a million years or more after the other dinosaurs had died before they, too, succumbed to the factors that had brought extinction to the others. In this light, the fact that a few hundred humans, the ragged remnants of a once mighty race, still exist may be of slight significance. We may be the Triceratops of the human species.

When the dinosaurs and many of the other reptiles died out, the mammals, which had existed in unknown numbers for millions of years, swarmed into the vacuum left by the dying reptiles and proliferated to take their place. Is this, then, another case of wiping out a certain mammalian population to give the other vertebrates a second chance, to lift from them the doom of man? Or is this facet of the situation only incidental? Has mankind, or the most of mankind, been removed to make way for a further evolutionary development? And if this should be the case, what and where is this new evolutionary creature?

What bothers one when he thinks of this is the strange process of extinction. A change in climate, a shifting of geography, disease, a scrambling of ecological parameters, factors that limit the food supply—all of these are physically, biologically and geologically understandable. The extinction, or the near extinction, of the human race is not. Slow, gradual extinction is one thing, instantaneous extinction is another. An instantaneous extinction postulates the machination of an intelligence rather than a natural process.

If the extinction were the result of the operation of another intelligence, one finds himself forced to ask not only where and what is this other intelligence, but more importantly, what could have been its purpose?

Is all life in the galaxy watched over by some great central intelligence that is alert to certain crimes that cannot be tolerated? Was the vanishing of the human race a punishment, an extermination, a death sentence passed because of what we'd done to planet Earth and to all the other creatures that had shared it with us? Or was it simply a removal, a cleansing— an action taken to ensure that a valuable planet would not be ruined utterly? Or, perhaps, in an even more far-reaching purpose, to give the planet a chance to replenish, over the next billion years or so, the natural resources of which it had been stripped—so that new coal fields might be laid down and new pools of oil created, so that ravaged soil could be rebuilt, new iron deposits come into being?

There is little purpose, I suppose, and less profit, to think of these things and to ask these questions. But man, being what he is, having obtained his shortlived dominance of the planet by virtue of his question-asking, will not be denied such speculation…

Half the afternoon the thick cloud bank had piled up in the sky and Hezekiah, watching as it climbed, had told himself that it were as if there were a ladder in the sky and the clouds had kept climbing it, growing taller and higher and more threatening and impressive as they climbed. Then, almost immediately, he had rebuked himself for thinking so—for there was no ladder, it was God's will that the clouds came climbing. He was puzzled and ashamed at these flights of fancy, at this romanticism, which he should have conquered long ago, but which, in the last few years (or so it seemed) had come welling more often to the surface. Or was it, he wondered, that only in the last few years he had directed his attention the more to these flights of fancy, aghast that there could linger in him such foolish notions, so far afield from the serious considerations to which he should be dedicated.

In the study the other brothers were bent above the books. They had sat thus for years, dedicated to the task of collating and condensing down to elemental truths all that the creature, man, had written, all that he had thought and reasoned and speculated in the spiritual sense. Of the four of them only he, Hezekiah, had not tied himself to the written or the printed word, and that had been according to the agreement they had made, in that time long centuries past when they had planned their search of truth. Three of them studying all that had been written— rewriting it, reassembling it, reassessing it, as if one man, and one man alone, had thought it all and written all of it as a single body, not many men who strove to understand, but one man who had truly understood. Three of them to do their work and the fourth who read their evaluations and assessments and, from this basis, try to puzzle out the meaning that had escaped the grasp of man. It had been a glorious idea, Hezekiah reassured himself; it had seemed so sound and it still was sound, but the way to truth was longer and more difficult than they had imagined and they still held no real inkling of the truth. Faith was something else; through the years their faith had deepened and been strengthened by their work, but the deepening of faith had not led the way to truth. Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well? There was nothing in the books to make one think this might be so, but while they had thousands of books, they did not have them all. Was there somewhere in the world, moldering away, or perhaps already moldered, a book (or several books) that would make it clear what man had really done, or had tried to do and failed.