A Choice of Gods

23

Uncle Jason had said that, as a beginning, she should read history—starting with the general histories. This, he said, would provide a basis for an understanding of all the rest of it.

Now, sitting at the desk in the library, with the night wind muttering in the eaves and the thick candle burned almost to its socket, Evening Star wondered wearily at the need of understanding. Understanding would not take the lines of worry from Uncle Jason's face. It would not ensure, if the People came, that the forests and the buffalo plains would remain, unchanged, the province of her people. And it would not tell her what had happened to David Hunt.

The last consideration, she admitted to herself, was for her, personally, the most important one of all. He had held and kissed her on that day they'd found the creature in the glen and they'd walked back to the house together hand in hand. And that had been the last she had seen of him, the last that anyone had seen of him. She had walked the woods, hoping she would find him or some trace of where he might have gone, and she remembered with a rush of shame that she had gone down the road to the monastery to inquire if he'd been there. The robots had not cared; they had been courteous, but scarcely pleasant, and she had walked back to the house feeling, in a sense, degraded, as if she had shown her naked body to those uncaring men of metal.

Had he run from her, she wondered. Or had she read more into what had happened that day in the glen than had actually been there? Both of them, she realized, had been shaken by the events that had transpired in the glen and their flooding emotions may have found an outlet in one another that was, viewed in a sober moment, entirely without meaning. She didn't think, she told herself, that had been the case. She had thought about it since and the answer seemed to be that the events had no more than triggered something that she had known and felt, but had not entirely realized—that she loved this wanderer from the west. But had he, she wondered, asked the same question of himself and found another answer?

Had he run away? Or was there something that he still must seek—after all the months and miles of seeking, was he seeking still? Was he convinced that what he hunted—perhaps not really knowing what he hunted—did not He in this house or in herself, and had he moved on toward the east in his endless quest?

She pushed the book away from her and sat in the quietness of the shadowed library, with all its tiers of books, with the candle guttering as it burned toward its end. Winter soon would come, she thought, and he would be cold. There were blankets she could have given him, there were robes that would have kept him warm. But he bad not told her he was going and there was no way she could know.

Once again she lived over in her mind that day when they had found the creature. It all had been most confusing and she found that it still was impossible to put it all together, saying that, first, this happened, then another event took place, and after that, another. It was all jumbled up together, as if everything had happened all at once with no chinks of time between them, but she knew it had not been that way, that there had been a progression of events, although they had happened rather fast and had not been orderly. The oddest thing of all was that she had trouble separating what David had done and what she had done and she wondered, once again, if, while they may not have done it all together, whether one of them alone could have made any of it happen, but that, rather, it took the two of them to do what each had done.

And what had she done, she wondered. What had happened to her? Trying to recall it, she could discover only fragments of it and she was sure that when it had happened there had been no fragmentation and that the fragments she could recall were no more than broken pieces of the whole. The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with every nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there—a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe. Seen for a moment, half-sensed, a flash of insight that had been gone before there had been time for it to register on her brain, sensed and known for an instant only and then gone so quickly that it had left impression only, no certain memory and no solid knowledge, but impressions only, like a face seen in a lightning flash and then the darkness closing in.

Was this—could this—be the realization of what she had tried to tell Grandfather Oak, knowing that there was something happening inside her, that change was about to come, but not knowing what it was and telling him instead that she might go away again, although in a different sense than she had gone to the wild rice country? If that were the case, she thought, if this were it, if this might be a new ability, like going to the stars, and not simply something that she had imagined, she'd never have to go anywhere again, for she was already there, she was any place that she might want to be.

It was the first time she had thought of it as an ability and she found herself confused and frightened, not so much at the implications of the thought as that she had thought of it at all, that she, even subconsciously, could have allowed herself to think of it. She sat stiff and straight, holding herself tense, and in the shadowed room flickering with the light of the dying candle, she seemed to hear again the muttering and stirring of all those ghosts that huddled there among their works, the one last place left to them on Earth.