Clifford Simak: A Choice of Gods

They are the ones who should be here instead of us, he thought, the people in that house, and then, almost as soon as he thought of it, recalled that for many centuries there had been only two of them in residence, Jason Whitney and his good wife, Martha. At times some of the others came back from the stars to visit their old home or the old family home (whichever it might be, for some of them had been born far among the stars). And what business did they have, Hezekiah asked, with a touch of bitterness, to be out among the stars? Their concern should not be with the stars and all that they might find to amuse themselves out there; any human's one concern rightfully should be the condition of his immortal soul.

In the grove of music trees beyond the monastery walls the leaves were rustling gently, but as yet the trees were silent. Later in the day, sometime in the afternoon, they'd do some tuning up for the nightly concert. It would be, he thought, with some reluctance at the thought, a glorious thing to hear. At times he had imagined their music was that of some heavenly choir, but it was all, he knew, in his imagination; at times the kind of music they produced was anything but churchly. It was thoughts like this, he told himself, and the action of sitting on a bench and the wearing of a robe that made himself and his companions less fit to perform with faith the task they'd taken up. But a naked robot, he told himself, could not stand before the Lord; he must have about him some of the habiliments of man ifhe were to take the place of man, who had so utterly forgotten.

The doubts and fears came flooding into him and he sat bowed against them. It would seem, he thought, one would become accustomed to them, for they'd been with him from the start (and with the others, too), but the sharpness of them had not dulled and they still cut him to the core. Rather than diminishing with familiarity, they had grown sharper as the years went on, with no answer found after centuries of poring over the meticulous commentaries and the extensive, searching writings of the human theologians. Was all of this, he asked himself in anguish, no more than a monstrous blasphemy? Could entities that had no souls minister to the Lord? Or might they, in their years of faith and work, have developed souls? He searched for a soul deep inside himself (and it was not the first time he had searched) and could find no soul. Even if there were one, he wondered, how could it be recognized? What ingredients went into the formation of a soul? Could one, in fact, be fashioned or need one be born with it—and if that should be the case, what genetic patterns were involved?

Were he and his fellow robots (his fellow monks?) usurping human rights? Were they, in sinful pride, aspiring to something reserved for the human race? Was it—had it ever been—within their province to attempt to maintain a human and a Godly institution that the humans had rejected and which even now God might not care about?

After breakfast, in the hushed quiet of the library, Jason Whitney sat at his desk and opened one of the bound record books which he had picked from a long row of its fellows on the shelf behind him. He saw that it had been more than a month since he had made an entry. Not, he thought, that there had been any real reason to make an entry then. Life ran so placidly that there were few ripples to record. Perhaps it would be better to put the book back on the shelf with nothing written in it, although it seemed, somehow, an act of faith to write an occasional paragraph at not too long an interval from the last one written. In the last month nothing of any consequence had happened—no one had come back to visit, there had been nothing but routine contacts from those out among the stars, there had been no word of the Indian bands, there had been no robots passing by and stopping, so there had been no news— although what the robots brought was rumor more often than it was news. There had been gossip, of course. Martha kept up a running conversation with others of the clan and when they sat on the patio to hear the nightly concert, she would fill him in on what had been said that day. But mostly it was woman talk and nothing to put down.

A narrow shaft of morning sun, slotted through the slit where the heavy drapes at one of the tall windows failed to come together, fell across him, lighting up the gray hair and the square and solid shoulders. He was a tall man, thin, but with a sense of strength that offset the thinness. His face was rugged, creased with tiny lines. The mustache bristled and was matched by the craggy brows that sat above the deep-sunken eyes that held a steely look in them. He sat in the chair, unmoving, looking at the room and wondering again at the quiet satisfaction that he always found within it, and at times more than satisfaction, as if the room, with its book-lined loftiness and vastness, carried a special benediction. The thoughts of many men, he told himself, resided in this space—all the great thinkers of the world held secure between the bindings of the volumes on the shelves, selected and placed there long ago by his grandfather so that in the days to come the essence of the human race, the heritage of recorded thought, would always be at hand. He recalled that he had often held the conceit that the essential characters of these ancient writers, the ghostly presence of the men themselves, had in the passing years settled on this room and late at night, when all else was quiet, he had often found himself conversing with these olden men, who emerged from the dust of the past into the shadow of the present.

The tier of books ran all around the room, broken only by two doors and, on the river side, three windows. When the first tier ended a balcony began, guarded by decorative metal railing, and on the balcony the second tier of books went all around the room. Above one of the doors a clock was mounted on the wall and for more than five thousand years, he reminded himself in wonder, the clock had kept on ticking, beating off the seconds century on century. The clock said 9:15 and how near, he wondered, was that to the correctness of the time as set up by men so many years ago. There was, he realized, no way that one might know, although it did not matter now. The world would be as well off if there were no clock.

Muffled sounds made their way into the room— the mournful lowing of a distant cow, the nearby barking of a dog, the insane cackling of a hen. The music trees still were silent—they'd not start tuning up until sometime in the afternoon. He wondered if they'd try one of the new compositions tonight. There had, of late, been a lot of them. If so, he hoped it would not be one of the experimental ones they had been trying lately. There were so many others they might play, so many of the old and favorite ones, but there was no sense to what they did. It seemed, he told himself, that it had been getting worse in the last few years since two of the older trees had shown some sign of dying. They had begun to lose some of their branches and each spring it seemed that their leaf output was smaller. There were young saplings to take their place, of course, and that might be the trouble. He put up his hand and brushed a finger across his mustache, worriedly. He wished for the thousandth time that he knew something about the care of trees. He had looked through some of the books, of course, but there seemed nothing there that would be of any help. And even if there were, one could not be sure that the music trees would respond to the treatment as would a tree of Earth.

At the sound of padding feet, he turned. The robot, Thatcher, was coming through the door.

"Yes, what is it, Thatcher?"

"It is Mr. Horace Red Cloud, sir."

"But Horace is up north. In the wild rice country."