Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

"Someone had to," Jason told him. "It was not a hardship. We have made a good life. We've been happy here."

"I asked about you often," Martha said. "I always asked about you. No one seemed to know."

"I've been far out," said John. "Out toward the center. There was something out there that I had to find. I went farther toward the center than any of the others. There were others who told me what was out there, or rather what might be out there, for they did not really know, and it seemed someone should go and see, and none of these others were about to go. Someone had to go. Someone had to go just as someone had to stay at home."

"Let's sit down," said Jason. "There's a lot you have to tell us, so let's be comfortable while you're telling it. Thatcher will bring in something and we can sit and talk. You are hungry, John?"

His brother shook his head.

"A drink, perhaps. All the old stuff's gone, but some of our robots are handy with moonshine of a sort. Properly aged and cared for, it is not too bad. We've tried to make wine, but this is not wine country. The soil's not right and the sun's not hot enough. It always turns out poor."

"Later on," said John. "After I have told you. Then we can have a drink."

"You went out to find the evil," Jason said. "That must be it. We know there's an evil out there. We got word of it quite some years ago. No one knew what it was—not even that it's really evil. All they knew was it had an evil smell."

"Not an evil," John told him. "Something worse than evil. A great uncaring. An intellectual uncaring. An intelligence that has lost what we think of as humanity. Perhaps not lost it, for it may have never had it. But that's not all of it. I found the People."

"The People!" Jason cried. "You can't mean that. No one ever knew. No one had the least idea…"

"Of course, no one ever knew. But I found them. They are on three planets, the planets close to one another, and they are doing very well, perhaps somewhat too well. They haven't changed. They are the same as they were five thousand years ago. They have followed to its logical conclusion the course we all were following five thousand years ago and now they are coming back to Earth. They are on their way to Earth."

A sudden wall of water slashed against the windows, driven by a wind that went howling in the eaves, far overhead.

"I do believe," said Martha, "that the storm has broken. It may be a bad one."

She sat and listened to the voices of the books— or, rather, perhaps, to the voices of the men who had written all the books, strange, grave voices far off in time, speaking from the depths of time, the distant mumble of many cultivated voices, without words, but with meaning and with thought instead of words, and she had never thought, she told herself, it could be anything like this. The trees had words to speak and the flowers a meaning and the little people of the woods often talked to her and the river and the running streams had music and a magic that surpassed understanding. But this was because they were living things—yes, even the river and the brook could be thought of as living things. Could it be that books were living, too?

She had never known there could be so many books, a large room, floor to ceiling, lined with rows of books, and many times that number, she had been told by the funny little robot, Thatcher, stored away in basement rooms. But the strangest thing of all was that she could think of a robot as being a funny sort of creature—almost as if he were a man. No great black horror that stalked the evening skyline, no midnight wraith out of the place of dreams; if not a man at least a manlike being with a gentle voice

Perhaps it had been something he had said: "Here you can trace and chart the path of man up from darkest night." Saying it proudly, as if he were a man himself and alone, in terror and in hope, had trod that very path.

The voices of the books kept mumbling m the dimness of the room while rain ran down the windows—a companionable muttering that must keep on forever, the ghostly conversations of long-dead writers whose works lined the study walls. Was it all imagination, she asked herself, or did others hear them, too—did Uncle Jason sometimes hear them as he sat here by himself? Although she knew, even as she wondered it, that this was something she could never ask. Or could it be heard by no one but herself, hearing it as she had heard the voice of Old Grandfather Oak on that long-gone summer day before the tribe had gone into the wild rice country, as she this very day had sensed the lifting of the arms and the benediction?

As she sat there, at a small desk in one corner of the room, with the book opened on the desk (not the big desk where Uncle Jason sat to write the chronicles), listening to the wind running in the eaves, watching the rain sluice down the windows from which Thatcher had drawn the drapes with the passing of the morning sun, she moved into another place, or seemed to move into another place, although the room remained. In this place were many people, or at least the shadows of many people, and many other desks and far distant times and places, although the distance of the times and places seemed less than they should have been, as if the veils of time and space had grown very thin and were ready to dissolve, so that she sat, an observer to a great event—the running together of all time and space so that the both of them became almost nonexistent, no longer caging men and events into separate cells, but running them all together, as if everything had happened all at once and in the self-same area, with the past crowding close upon the future within the confines of a tiny point of existence that, for convenience, might be called the present. Frightened at what was happening, she nevertheless glimpsed for a terrible, sublime moment all the causes and effects, all the direction and the purpose, all the agony and glory that had driven men to write all the billions of words that stood stacked within the room. Glimpsed it all without understanding, with no time or capacity for an understanding, understanding only that what had happened in the minds of men to drive them to create all the mumbled, scribbled, burning words had not been so much the work of many individual minds as the impact of a pattern of existence upon the minds of all mankind.

The spell (if it were no more than a spell) was broken almost immediately, with Thatcher coming through the door and padding across the room toward her, carrying a tray which he put down upon the desk.

"This is slightly delayed, miss," he apologized. "Just as I was about to bring it Nicodemus from the monastery came rushing in to say that hot soup and blankets and many other things were needed for the comfort of an injured pilgrim."

A glass of milk, a jar of wild gooseberry jam, slices of buttered bread and a slab of honey cake rested on the tray. "It is not elaborate," said Thatcher. "It is not as splendid as a guest of this house has reason to expect, but taking care of the monastery's needs, I did not have the time to do full justice to it."

"It is more than adequate," said Evening Star. "I had not expected such a kindness. Busy as you were, you should not have bothered."

"Miss," said Thatcher, "through the centuries it has been my pleasure and responsibility to operate this household according to certain standards that have not varied through all the days of my stewardship. I am only sorry that the procedure should, for the first time, have been upset on your first day here."

"Never mind," she told him. "You said a pilgrim. Do pilgrims often come to the monastery? I have never heard of them."

"This one," Thatcher said, "is the first there ever was. And I am not sure that he is a pilgrim, although that is what Nicodemus called him. A mere wanderer, no doubt, although that is memorable in itself, for never before has there been a human wanderer. A young man, almost naked, as Nicodemus tells it, with a bear-claw necklace encircling his throat."