Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

They told me that their names were Hezekiah, Nicodemus, Jonathon and Ebenezer, and that if I had no objection they would like to occupy the monastery buildings down the road and devote their entire time to a study of Christianity. They seemed to have gotten the idea that man had stopped far short of the point he should have reached in his study of religion and that they, as objective students, might press the matter much beyond man's short-range venture into it I could detect about them no sign of religious fervor, although I greatly fear if they continue at it (they have been at it, at the time of this writing, almost thirty years) they will not be able to maintain an objective attitude and may develop unthinking religious fanaticism. I am not even now convinced (perhaps now less convinced than I was then) that I was right in raising no objections to their project. It may not have been right or wise to turn a group of robots loose upon so sensitive a subject. I suppose fanatics have their proper niche in all societies, but the thought of fanatic robots (fanatic on any subject, and religion somehow seems to breed fanatics) does not particularly enchant me. The entire business suggests a situation that can be really frightening. With the most of mankind gone and all the robots left, the robots in time may move to fill the vacuum thus created. They were made to serve us and they cannot, by the very nature of them, be idle. One wonders if, lacking men to serve, in time they will not somehow contrive to serve themselves. If that should be the case, what sort of motives might they have and what kind of purpose? Surely not human and for that, I would suppose, one might be duly grateful. But it is with what I tell myself is pardonable apprehension that one must view the rise of a new philosophy and a setting of new values by creatures that were created in their final form little more than a century ago, having no evolutionary period in which they could develop by the same slow process as man and the other creatures of the Earth (not forgetting that man, even with his long history, may have developed far too fast). It may be that they will take time to evolve, not consciously, of course, but because they will need the time to form, for themselves, a logical operating base. But the time will be short, I fear, and because of this the possibility of serious flaws exists. Evolution supplies the time for testing and rejecting and because of this, has a way of straightening out the kinks in a way of life. For the robots there can be little in the way of evolution and thus many of the kinks will be carried over into their final thinking.

But I get beyond my story. To get back to the four who came to see me. If they were to carry on the work that they proposed, they said, they must have a large body of religious writings and they wondered if they could go along with us on our book-hunting expeditions, being willing to help us with the labor in return for our hauling back the books selected for their studies. The offer of labor was much beside the point, for we had all the robots that we needed for the actual work. But for some reason which I now do not understand (and may not have understood at the time) T agreed. Perhaps the agreement came because the thing they proposed to do seemed more ridiculous than it does now. I may even have chuckled at it then, although after further deliberations I have no chuckles for it.

The collection of our library proved a much harder task than I had anticipated. It was an easy matter, on the face of it, to sit down and write a list, saying that we need Shakespeare, Proust, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Gibbon, Locke, Euripides, Aristophanes, Tolstoy, Pascal, Chaucer, Montaigne, Hemingway, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Faulkner and all the others that would go on any list; that we needed texts on mathematics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy, biology, philosophy, psychology and many other branches of the arts and sciences, with the possible exception of medicine, which no longer seems necessary to those of us on Earth (although one can't be entirely sure of that), but how can one be sure he has not missed something that at sometime in the future will be, not sadly missed, for not knowing of it, it will not be missed, but which will not be there for use when there could be need of it. And how does one, obversely, know that much of what he does select may not, in time to come, be unworthy of the space it takes?

Over the years, of course, there may be opportunity to supply any deficit, to obtain what might have been overlooked. But as the years go on, it will be more difficult to do. Even when we collected the books we bad great difficulties. The trucks we used required continual tinkering to keep them running and in many cases the roads had deteriorated, through flood and frost and other circumstances, to a point where they were often hard to travel. At some places, we were forced to make detours. The trucks, of course, are no longer usable; after a time even the most determined tinkering could not keep them running. The roads, I would presume, are now much farther gone to ruin, although they still possibly could be used by wagons. I can foresee a time (although we tried our best to guard against such an eventuality) when men, seeking a particular book or books, of which they might have found some reference, will be forced to strike out afoot or by pack train through the wilderness in hopes of finding a still existent library or some other depository where there still may exist the books we may have forgotten to place upon our list

By that time, perhaps, the books no longer will exist. Even housed under the best circumstances in the long deserted cities, the weather will get at them, and the rodents and the worms, and if nothing else, sheer time will take the toll.

We finally located and transported here all the books that we had listed. With the art objects we sought to salvage we encountered greater problems, principally because with them space was a greater consideration than it is with books. We had to painfully select and choose with the greatest care. How many Rembrandts, for example, could we allow ourselves, knowing that each extra Rembrandt would rob us of a Courbet or a Renoir? Because of the very lack of space, both in transportation and in storage, we were forced to choose the smaller canvas rather than the larger. The same criterion applied to all other categories of the arts.

There are times when I could weep, thinking of all the great endeavors and accomplishments of mankind we were forced to leave to be forever lost…

Horace Red Cloud squatted by the fire for a long time after the two white men had left. He had watched them leave, going up the hollow that ran back into the hills, until a twisting of the hollow had hidden them from view, and after they were gone, had stayed by the fire, unmoving. The morning was far gone, but as yet the camp lay in shadow, the sun not having risen enough into the sky to clear the towering bluffs that blocked its light. The camp was quiet, quieter than usual—the others knew something was afoot, but they would not intrude upon him, there beside the fire; they would not ask, but wait for him to tell them. The women went about their work as usual, but with less commotion, without a banging of the pans and yelling back and forth. The small-fry huddled, quiet in groups, whispering to one another, bursting with excitement. The others were not in camp—perhaps working in the cornfields, although some of them would be fishing or out prowling. One could not expect a man, especially a young man, to spend an entire day at drudgery. Even the dogs were quiet.

The fire had burned to a gray ash, with some blackened sticks showing at its edges and a hint of heat lying in its heart, with only the smallest of smoke rising from the ash and the ends of the blackened sticks. Slowly he put out his hands, holding them in the smoke, scrubbing them together, washing them with smoke. He did it absentmindedly and was somewhat amused when he saw what he was doing. A cultural reflex action, he wondered, still keeping his hands where they were, still washing them with smoke. Thus his far ancestors had washed their hands in smoke as a purification rite, one of the many senseless little gestures they went through when they stood upon the brink of magic, symbolically purifying themselves so they could deal in magic. And how much had he and the others lost when they had turned their backs on magic? Belief, of course, and there might be some value in belief, although there was, as well, delusion and did a man want to pay for the value of belief in the coinage of delusion? Although we've lost very little, he told himself, and have gained a great deal more—an understanding of ourselves as a factor of ecology. We have learned to live with trees and water, with earth and sky and wind, with weather, and the wild things, as if they were brothers to us. Using them as we need them, not abusing our need and use of them, respecting them, living with them, being one with them. Not using them as the white man did, not owning them, not ignoring them, with no contempt of them.