A Choice of Gods

13

Jason woke in the night and could not go to sleep again. It was not his body that defied sleep, he knew; it was his mind, so filled with speculation, half numbed with apprehension, that it refused to rest.

Finally he got up and began to dress.

From her bed, Martha asked, "What is the matter, Jason?"

"Can't sleep," he told her. "I am going for a walk."

"Take your cape," she said. "The night wind might be chill. And try not to worry. It will work out all right."

Going down the stairs, he knew that she was wrong and knew she must be wrong; she spoke the way she did in an attempt to cheer him. It would not work out all right. When the People returned to Earth, life would be changed, it would never be the same again.

As he came out on the patio, old Bowser came wobbling around the corner of the kitchen. There was no sign of the younger dog that usually accompanied him on his walks, or of any of the others. They were either asleep somewhere or out exploring for a coon or maybe nosing out the mice from among the corn shocks. The night was quiet and slightly chilly and had at once a frosty and a melancholy feel about it. A thin moon hung in the west, above the darkness of the wooded bluff across the Mississippi. The faint, sharp tang of dying leaves hung in the air.

Jason went down the path that led to the point of rocks above the meeting of the rivers. The old dog fell in behind him. The crescent moon shed but little light, although, Jason told himself, he scarcely needed light. He had walked this path so many times he could find it in the dark.

The earth was quiet, he thought, not only here, but everywhere. Quiet and resting after the turbulent centuries when man cut down its trees, ripped out its minerals, plowed its prairies, built upon broad expanses of it and fished its waters. After this short rest, would it all begin again? The ship heading for the Earth from the human planets was only an exploratory probe, to find old Earth again, to make sure the astronomers were right in their calculations, to survey it and take back the word. And after that, Jason wondered, what would happen? Would the humans rest with having satisfied an intellectual curiosity, or would they reassert their ancient ownership—although he doubted very much that at any time man could have been said to have truly owned the Earth. Rather, they had taken it, wresting it from the other creatures that had as much right of ownership as they, but without the intelligence or the ingenuity or power to assert their rights. Man had been the pushy, arrogant interloper rather than the owner. He had taken over by the force of mind, which could be as detestable as the force of muscle, making his own rules, setting his own goals, establishing his own values in utter disregard of all other living things.

A shadow lifted out of a grove of oaks and sailed down into a deep ravine, to be swallowed by the shadow and the silence of which it was a part. An owl, Jason told himself. There were a lot of them, but no one but a night-roamer ever had a chance to see them, for they hid themselves by day. Something ran rustling through the leaves and Bowser cocked an ear at it and snuffled, but either knew too much or was too old and stiff to attempt a chase. A weasel more than likely, or possibly a mink, although this was a bit too far from water for a mink. Too big for a mouse, too silent for a rabbit or an otter.

A man got to know his neighbors, Jason told himself, when he no longer hunted them. In the old days he hunted them, and so had many of the others once the wildlife had been given the chance to grow back to numbers that made hunting reasonable. Sport, they called it, but that had been nothing more than a softer name for the bloodlust that man had carried with him from prehistoric days, when hunting had been a business of keeping life intact—man blood brother to the other carnivores. And man, he thought, the greatest carnivore of all. Now there was no need for such as he to prey upon his brothers of the woodland and the marsh. Meat was supplied by the herds and flocks, although even so he supposed that even this equated to a modified carnivorous mode of life. Even if one wanted to hunt he would have had to revert to the bow and arrow and the lance. The guns still rested in their cases and were meticulously cleaned and oiled by robotic hands, but the supply of powder long had been exhausted and no way, without much study and laborious effort, that it could be resupplied.

The path bent up the hill to the little field where the corn stood in scattered shocks, the pumpkins still upon the ground. In another day or two the robots would haul in the pumpkins for storage, but the com probably would be left in the shocks until all the other work of autumn had been done. It could be brought in later or, more likely, shucked in the field even after snow lay upon the ground.

In the dim moonlight, the shocks reminded Jason of an Indian encampment and the sight made him wonder if the robots had taken down to Horace Red Cloud's camp the flour and corn meal, the bacon and all the other supplies that he had ordered taken. The chances were they had. The robots were most meticulous in all matters and he fell to wondering, as he had many times before, exactly what they got out of such an arrangement as caring for him and Martha, the house and farm. Or, for that matter, what any robot got out of anything at all… Hezekiah and the others in the monastery, the robots at their mysterious building project up the river. This wonderment, he realized, grew out of the old profit motive which had been the obsession and the mainstay of the ancient human race. You didn't do a thing unless there was some material return. Which, of course, was wrong, but the old habit, the old way of thinking, sometimes still intruded and he felt a touch of shame that it should still intrude.

If the humans should repossess the Earth, the old profit motive and the subsidiary philosophies that depended on it would be reestablished, and the Earth, except for whatever benefits it might have gained from its five thousand years of rest from the human plague, would be no better off than it had been before. There was just a bare possibility, he knew, that there would be no move to repossess it. They would know, of course, that the bulk of its resources had been depleted, but even that consideration might not be taken into account. There might be (he could not be sure and John had said nothing about it) a yearning in many of them to return to the ancestral planet. Five thousand years should be a long enough span of time to make the planets on which they now resided seem like home, but one could not be certain. At the very best, Earth would be subjected, more than likely, to streams of tourists and of pilgrims coming back to pay sentimental homage to mankind's parent planet.

He passed the cornfield and went along a narrow ridge to the point of rocks that hung above the meeting of the rivers. The waning moon made the converging streams shining silver roads cutting through the dark woodlands of the valley. He sat down on the boulder where he always sat, wrapping his heavy cape around him against the chill night wind. Sitting in the silence and hushed loneliness, he was surprised to find himself untouched by the loneliness. For this was home, he thought, and no man could be lonely who stayed close within his home.

That was why, of course, he viewed with such horror the arrival of the People. He could not abide the invasion of his home, of the land that he had made his territory as truly as other animals marked out their territorial rights—not by virtue, however, of any human right, not through any sense of ownership, but by the quiet procedure of simply living here. Not taking over, not contending with his little wildlife neighbors the right to use and walk the land, but by simply staying on in very simple peace.

It could not be allowed, he told himself. They could not be allowed to come back and spoil the Earth again. They could not, for a second time, contaminate it with their machines. He must find a way to stop them, and even as he thought that he must find a way, he knew there was no way. One old and selfish man could not stand against all humanity; perhaps he had no right to stand against humanity. They had their three planets only, and the Earth would make a fourth, while the other small segment of humanity, those not taken in the net that had swept the others off the Earth, had all the galaxy, all the universe, perhaps, if the time ever came when they wished to spread throughout the universe.

Except that he'd not gone out into the galaxy, neither he nor Martha. This was their home, not just these few acres, but the entire Earth. And there was, as well, the others—the Leech Lake Indians. What of them? What would happen to them and their way of life if the others should come back? Another reservation? Another penning up?

Back on the ridge a stone was dislodged by something and went rolling down the slope. Jason sprang swiftly to his feet.

"Who's out there?" he demanded.

It might be a bear. It might be a deer. It was neither.

"It's Hezekiah, sir," a voice said. "I saw you leave the house and I followed you."

"Come on in," said Jason. "Why did you follow me?"

"To give you thanks," the robot said. "My very heartfelt thanks."

He came lumbering out of the darkness.

"Sit down," said Jason. "That boulder over there. It is comfortable."

"I have no need of comfort. I have no need to sit."

"And yet you do," said Jason. "I see you often sitting on the bench beneath the willow tree."

"It is an affectation only," Hezekiah said. "An aping of my betters and a quite unworthy act. I feel great shame of it."

"Continue in your shame," said Jason, "if you enjoy it, but please humor me. I have a need of comfort and a need to sit and shall feel most uncomfortable if you continue standing."

"If you insist," said Hezekiah.

"Indeed I do," said Jason, "and now what is this imaginary kindness for which you wish to thank me?"

"It concerns the pilgrim."

"Yes, I know. Thatcher told me of him."

"I am fairly certain," the robot said, "that he is not a pilgrim. Nicodemus, I know, told Thatcher that he was. Nicodemus got carried away. It is so easy, sir, to get carried away when you want something very much."

"I can understand," said Jason.

"It would have been so wonderful if he had been a pilgrim. It would have meant that the word had spread of the labor in which we are engaged. Not a robot pilgrim, you understand, but a human pilgrim…"

Jason sat quietly. The wind fluttered the robe that the robot wore. Hezekiah picked at it, trying to wrap it more closely about himself.

"Pride," he said. "That's the thing to fight. Like sitting down when there is no need to sit. Wearing a robe when there is need of none. Pacing up and down the garden, thinking, when one could think as well if one were standing still."

Jason sat unmoving, keeping his mouth tight shut when he wanted to scream questions: What about this pilgrim? Who is he? Where did he come from? What has he been doing all these years? But remembering with a sour amusement that up until a few moments ago the worry and the fret of the human race returning had blanketed out any real concern about the stranger at the monastery.

"The thing I want to say is this," said Hezekiah. "I know how long the humans at the House hunted for other humans in the world. I recall all the rumors that were brought and how, rumor by rumor, you were disappointed. Now a human does show up and you'd have been quite within your rights to have come hurrying down to claim him. And yet you did not do it. You stayed away. You let us have our human. You gave us our hour of glory."

"We figured that it was your show," said Jason. "We talked about it and decided to stay away. We can talk with this man later. There is little likelihood that he will run off. He must have traveled far to get here."

"Our hour of glory," Hezekiah said, "and an empty hour, for we know now we did no more than delude ourselves. I sometimes wonder if our whole life may not be delusion."

"You'll not get me," said Jason, "to wallow on the ground with you in your game of martyr. You've sat down there for years, I know, and eaten out your hearts, wondering if you were doing right, if you might be engaged in blasphemy, if you should not be stricken dead for your presumption. Well, the answer is that you've not been stricken dead.."

"You mean that you approve. That you, a human…"

"No," said Jason. "Not approve, or disapprove. What basis do I have to judge?"

"But once upon a time…"

"Yes, I know. Once upon a time man made images out of sticks and clay and worshiped them. Once upon a time he thought the sun was God. How many times must man be mistaken before he learns the truth?"

"I see your point," said Hezekiah. "Do you think we may ever know the truth?"

"How much do you want to know the truth?"

"We seek it," said Hezekiah, "with all our energies. That's the purpose in us, is it not?"

"I don't know," said Jason. "I wish very much I did."

He thought how ridiculous it was, sitting on this windy ridge in the dead of night, talking about the possibility of truth—of any truth, at all—with a fanatic robot. He could tell Hezekiah about the Principle that John had found. He could tell him about the alien who had come to seek a soul. And what good would it do if he told him either?

"I tell you my troubles," Hezekiah said. "You have troubles of your own. You walk the night thinking of your trouble."

Jason grunted uncommittally. He might have suspected. The robots knew what was going on, sometimes, it seemed, before you knew of it yourself. They walked quietly when they wished and heard and, once heard, the news sprang from one to the other of them like an electric impulse. Thatcher would have heard the talk at dinner and later on the patio while they listened to the concert, with the evening clean and beautiful after the passing of the rain (and, come to think of it, there had been something very funny happened at the concert). But it was not only Thatcher. Thatcher, perhaps, less than all the rest of them. They always were around. They listened and they pried and later they talked it over interminably among themselves. There was nothing wrong in it, of course. There was nothing that one had any wish to hide. But their obsession with every little detail of the human world sometimes was disconcerting.

"I," said Hezekiah, "share your great concern."

"How is that?" Jason asked, surprised.

"I understand how you must feel," the robot told him. "Perhaps not all the others, out among the Stars. But you and Miss Martha, certainly the two of you…"

"Not only us," said Jason. "How about the tribes? The lives of their ancestors were dislocated once. Must it happen again? They have made a new life for themselves. Must they give it up? And how about your people? Would you be happier if there were more humans? At times I think you would."

"Some of us, perhaps," said Hezekiah. "Our function is to serve and there are so few to serve. If only the tribes…"

"But you know they won't. They'll have none of you."

"I was about to say," said Hezekiah, "that there is a certain segment of us who might not look kindly upon their coming back. I do not know too much about them, but they are engaged upon a project…"

"You mean the installation up the river?"

The robot nodded. "You might talk with them. You might find some help."

"You think that they would help us, would be willing to?"

"There is talk," said Hezekiah, "of marvelous new ideas, of very cunning work. There is none of it I can understand."

Jason sat hunched upon his boulder. He shivered and drew the cape close about his shoulders. The night suddenly seemed darker and lonely and perhaps a little frightening.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll see about it."

In the morning he'd go down to the river landing and talk with Horace Red Cloud. Horace might know what could be done.