Clifford Simak - Grotto of the Dancing Deer - And Other Stories

“I’m looking forward to meeting Anastasia,” Paxton said. “I remember that you wrote of her often and—”

“She’s not here,” said Nelson. “She—well, she left me. Almost five years ago. She missed Outside too much. None of us should marry outside Continuation.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right, Stan. It’s all done with now. There are some who simply do not fit into the project. I’ve wondered many times, since Anastasia left, what kind of folks we are. I’ve wondered if it all is worth it.”

“All of us think that way at times,” said Paxton. “There have been times when I’ve been forced to fall back on history to find some shred of justification for what we’re doing here. There’s a parallel in the monks of the so-called Middle Ages. They managed to preserve at least part of the knowledge of the Hellenic world. For their own selfish reasons, of course, as Continuation has its selfish reasons, but the human race was the real beneficiary.”

“I go back to history, too,” said Nelson. “The one that I come up with is a Stone Age savage, hidden off in some dark corner, busily flaking arrows while the first spaceships are being launched. It all seems so useless, Stan…”

“On the face of it, I suppose it is. It doesn’t matter in the least that I was elected President in our just-finished exercise. But there may be a day when that knowledge and technique of politics may come in very handy. And when it does, all the human race will have to do is come back here to Earth and they have the living art. This campaign that I waged was a dirty one, Nelson. I’m not proud of it.”

“There’s a good deal of dirty things in the human culture,” Nelson said, “but if we commit ourselves at all, it must be all the way—the vicious with the noble, the dirty with the splendid.”

A door opened quietly and Elijah glided in. It had two glasses on a tray.

“I heard you come in,” it said to Nelson, “so I brought you something, too.”

“Thank you,” Nelson said. “That was kind of you.”

Elijah shuffled in some embarrassment. “If you don’t mind, could you hurry just a little? The old gentleman has almost killed the bottle. I’m afraid of what might happen to him if I don’t get back to the table.”

Dinner had been finished and young Graham hustled off to bed. Granther unearthed, with great solemnity, another bottle of good brandy.

“That boy is a caution,” he declared. “I don’t know what’s to become of him. Imagine him out there all day long, fighting those fool battles. If he was going to take up something, I should think he’d want it to be useful. There’s nothing more useless than a general when there are no wars.”

Grandma clacked her teeth together with impatience. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t tried. We gave him every chance there was. But he wasn’t interested in anything until he took up warring.”

“He’s got guts,” said Granther proudly. “That much I’ll say for him. He up and asked me the other day would I write him some battle music. Me!” yelled Granther, thumping his chest. “Me write battle music!”

“He’s got the seeds of destruction in him,” declared Grandma righteously. “He doesn’t want to build. He just wants to bust.”

“Don’t look at me,” Nelson said to Paxton. “I gave up long ago. Granther and Grandma took him over from me right after Anastasia left. To hear them talk, you’d think they hated him. But let me lift a finger to him and the both of them—”

“We did the best we could,” said Grandma. “We gave him every chance. We bought him all the testing kits. You remember?”

“Sure,” said Granther, busy with the bottle. “I remember well. We bought him that ecology kit and you should have seen the planet he turned out. It was the most pitiful, down-at-heels, hungover planet you ever saw. And then we tried robotry—”

“He did right well at that,” said Grandma tartly.

“Sure, he built them. He enjoyed building them. Recall the time he geared the two of them to hate each other and they fought until they were just two piles of scrap? I never saw anyone have such a splendid time as Graham during the seven days they fought.”

“We could scarcely get him in to meals,” said Grandma.

Granther handed out the brandy.

“But the worst of all,” he decided, “was the time we tried religion. He dreamed up a cult that was positively gummy. We made short work of that…”

“And the hospital,” said Grandma. “That was your idea, Nels…”

“Let’s not talk about it,” pleaded Nelson grimly. “I am sure Stanley isn’t interested.”

Paxton picked up the cue Nelson was offering him. “I was going to ask you, Grandma, what kind of painting you are doing. I don’t recall that Nelson ever told me.”

“Landscapes,” the sweet-faced old lady said. “I’ve been doing some experimenting.”

“And I tell her she is wrong,” protested Granther. “To experiment is wrong. Our job is to maintain tradition, not to let our work go wandering off in whatever direction it might choose.”

“Our job,” said Grandma bitterly, “is to guard the techniques. Which is not to say we cannot strive at progress, if it still is human progress. Young man,” she appealed to Paxton, “isn’t that the way you see it?”

“Well, in part,” evaded Paxton, caught between two fires. “In Politics, we allow evolvement, naturally, but we make sure by periodic tests that we are developing logically and in the human manner. And we make very sure we do not drop any of the old techniques, no matter how outmoded they may seem. And the same is true in Diplomacy. I happen to know a bit about Diplomacy, because the two sections work very close together and—”

“There!” Grandma said.

“You know what I think?” said Nelson quietly. “We are a frightened race. For the first time in our history, the human race is a minority and it scares us half to death. We are afraid of losing our identity in the great galactic matrix. We’re afraid of assimilation.”

“That’s wrong, son,” Granther disagreed. “We are not afraid, my boy. We’re just awful smart, that’s all. We had a great culture at one time and why should we give it up? Sure, most humans nowadays have adopted the galactic way of life, but that is not to say that it is for the best. Some day we may want to turn back to the human culture or we may find that later on we can use parts of it. And this way, if we keep it alive here in Project Continuation, it will be available, all of it or any part, any time we need it. And I’m not speaking, mind you, from the human view alone, because some facet of our culture might sometime be badly needed, not by the human race as such, but by the Galaxy itself.”

“Then why keep the project secret?”

“I don’t think it’s really secret,” Granther said. “It’s just that no one pays much attention to the human race and none at all to Earth. The human race is pretty small potatoes against all the rest of them and Earth is just a worn-out planet that doesn’t amount to shucks.”

He asked Paxton: “You ever hear it was secret, boy?”

“Why, I guess not,” said Paxton. “All I ever understood was that we didn’t go around shooting off our mouths about it. I’ve thought of Continuation as a sort of sacred trust. We’re the guardians who watch over the tribal medicine bag while the rest of humanity is out among the stars getting civilized.”

The old man chortled. “That’s about the size of it. We’re just a bunch of bushmen, but mark me well, intelligent and even dangerous bushmen.”

“Dangerous?” asked Paxton.

“He means Graham,” Nelson told him quietly.