A Choice of Gods

3

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."

"It seems, sir, the band has moved. They are camped down by the river, in their old camping grounds. They plan to restore the old fields and put in a crop next spring."

"You had a talk with him?"

"Sir," said Thatcher, "he is an old acquaintance and, naturally, I passed a few words with him. He brought a bag of rice."

"I hope you thanked him, Thatcher."

"Oh, indeed I did, sir."

"You should have brought him in."

"He said he had no desire to disturb you, sir, if you happened to be busy."

"I am never really busy. Surely you know that."

"Then," said Thatcher, "I'll ask him to step in."

Jason rose and walked around the desk, standing beside it, waiting for his friend. How long had it been, he wondered—four years, or five—it surely must be five. He'd gone down to the camp to bid his old friend good-bye and after the band had embarked, had stood for a long time on the shingle of the shore, watching the long line of canoes move swiftly up the river, paddles flashing in the sunlight.

Red Cloud was the same age as Jason, but had a younger look. When he came into the room and across the carpeting, his stride had a young man's spring. His hair was black, without a trace of gray; it was parted exactly down the center of his scalp and hung in two heavy braids across his shoulders to dangle on his chest. His face was weather-beaten but, except for a tiny network of crow's feet at the corner of his eyes, had not a wrinkle in it. He wore a buckskin shirt and leggings, with moccasins on his feet. The hand he held out to Jason was thick and calloused with short, blunt fingers.

"It has been a long time, Horace," Jason said. "I am glad to see you."

"You are the only one," said Red Cloud, "who still calls me Horace."

"All right, then," said Jason, "shall I call you Chief? Or Cloud? Or maybe Red?" Red Cloud grinned. "From you, Jason, Horace sounds just fine. We were boys together. Surely you remember. And it brings back the times when we roamed the woods together. We nicked our wrists and held the cuts together so that our blood would mingle. Or at least we thought that it would mingle. I rather doubt it did. But that is neither here nor there. The important thing was the symbolism."

"I remember," Jason said. "I can remember that first day, when your band came paddling down the river and saw the smoke rising from one of our chimneys. All of you, the whole kit and caboodle of you, came swarming up the hill to see what it was all about and for the first time both your band and the people at this house learned that they were not alone, but there still were others left."

"We built big fires out on the lawn," said Red Cloud, "and we killed a beef or two and had a barbecue. We joined hands in a ring and danced around the fires, whooping and hollering. Your grandfather of blessed memory rolled out a keg of whiskey and we all got rather drunk."

"That was when you and I first met," said Jason. "Two young sprouts out to show the world—except there was no world to show. We took to one another almost immediately. We went hunting and fishing together and we roamed the hills. And we chased the girls."

"We caught some of them, as I recall," said Red Cloud.

"They weren't hard to catch," said Jason.

They stood, looking into one another's face, silently, then Jason said, "Let's sit down. There must be a lot we need to talk about."

Red Cloud sat down in a chair and Jason took another and spun it around so he could face his friend.

"How long has it been?" he asked.

"Six years."

"You just arrived?"

"A week ago," said Red Cloud. "We left the north after the wild rice harvest. We didn't travel fast. We stopped whenever we found a good camping place and loafed around and hunted. Some of our young men took the horses down west of the river and will hold them there until there is ice to cross. Later, when it gets colder, we'll cross over and hunt for whiter meat. Buffalo and wild cattle. A runner came in last night and said there are a lot of them on the prairies."

Jason frowned. "A week, you say. You shouldn't have waited so long. If you didn't have time yourself, you should have sent a runner. I'd have come down to visit you."

"The time went fast. There was much to do. We are trying to get the corn ground into shape. The fields have grown up to brush and weeds. We ran out of corn and got hungry for it. Tried to grow some up north, but the season was too short. Got it in late and the frost caught it. Had some roasting ears, but that was all."

"We have corn," said Jason. "A lot of it, ground and ready. I'll send some down to the camp before the day is over. What else do you need—bacon, eggs, flour? We have some good wheat flour. More by far than we can use. Cloth, if you want it. The wool has been good and the looms busy."

"Jason, I didn't come begging…"

"I know you didn't. For years we've shared things back and forth. I hate to think of how much meat and fish and berries and other things your folks packed up the hill for us in days gone by. Thatcher says you brought some rice…"

"All right," said Red Cloud. "You'll not object to a supply of buffalo meat when we make the hunt?"

"Not at all," said Jason.

"Better yet, how about coming along on the hunt?"

"There is nothing I'd like better."

"Good! It will be like old times. We'll let the others do the work. We'll sit around the fire, you and I, and talk and eat hump meat."

"You live a good life, Horace."

"I think we do. There were so many ways we could have gone. We could have settled down. We could have taken over some good housing and good fields and put in crops and collected us some livestock. We could have become good farmers. But we didn't. We took up the old ways. I guess we never were too far from them. In the heart of each of us, we'd dreamed of them time and yet again. The pull was there. The call was there. Our ancestors had lived the life for thousands of years. We had only a few hundred years of the white man's way and they had been far from good years. We never fitted in, we never had a chance to. It was a relief to shuck off all of it and go back to the flowers, the trees, the clouds, the seasons and the weather, the running water, the creatures of the woods and prairies—to make them a part of us again, more a part of us than they'd ever been before. We learned something from the whites, that we can't deny—we'd have been stupid if we hadn't. And we used these white man's ways to make the old way of life an even better life. Sometimes I wonder if we made the right choice, then I see an autumn leaf—one leaf alone, not a lot of leaves—or hear the sound of a little stream of water running in the woods, or catch a forest scent, and then I know we were not wrong. We went back to the earth, linked ourselves with the hills and streams, and that is the way it should be. That is the way we were meant to live. Not back to the old tribal concept, but back to a way of life. We were a woodland tribe to start with, but now we are no longer woodland. Maybe we're simply Indian. We adopted the skin tepee of the Western plains tribes and, in large part, their way of dress and their use of horses. But we kept the birch bark canoe, the wild rice harvest and the maple sugar. It has been a good life. You and I, old friend, have caught the feel of life—I in my tepee, you in this stone house. You never went to the stars and you may be better off for never having gone. I suppose they find great things out there…"

"A few things," Jason said. "Many interesting things. Perhaps even some useful items. But we put few of them to any use. We have seen them, observed them, even studied them, in some cases arrived at an understanding of what is going on. But we no longer are a technological race. We lost technology when we lost the manpower and the knowledge and the machines broke down and there was no one to start them up again and no energy to run them. We don't mourn that lost technology, as I think you know. At one time we might have, but not any longer. It would be a bother now. We have become competent observers and we gain our satisfaction from our observations, achieving minor triumphs when we are able to reach some solid understanding. Knowing is the goal, not the using. We aren't users. We have somehow risen above using. We can rest content to see resources lying idle; we might even think it shameful to try to use or harness them. And it's not only resources; it's ideas and…"

"How much do you remember, Jason? How much, really, from the old days? Not how our tribe found your people, but all the rest of it."

"I remember rather vividly," said Jason. "And so should you. You were a young man, with me, when it happened. We were both at the impressionable age. It should have made a great impact on us."

Red Cloud shook his head. "My memory is dim. There are too many other things. I can scarcely remember any other life than the one we live today."

"My remembrance is in a book, or in many books," said Jason, gesturing at the shelf behind the desk. "It all is written down. My grandfather began it, some fifty years after it happened, writing it down so we'd not forget, so it would not become a myth. He wrote all that he could remember of what had happened and once that was finished, he made regular entries. When he finally died, I took up the work. It all is written down, from the day it happened."

"And when you die," asked Red Cloud, "who then will do the writing?"

"I do not know," said Jason.

"Jason, a thing I have often wondered, but have never asked. May I ask it now?"

"Certainly. Anything at all"

"Why did you never go out to the stars?"

"Perhaps because I can't."

"But you never tried. You never really wanted to."

"The others went out one by one," said Jason, "until only Martha and I were left. It seemed that someone should stay. It seemed that we should not leave Earth entirely. Someone belonged here. An anchor man, perhaps, for the others who had gone. To keep the home fires burning. Be here to welcome the others back when they wanted to come home. To keep a place for them."

"They do come back, of course. And you are here to welcome them."

"Some of them," said Jason. "Not all. My brother, John, was one of the first to go. He has not been back. We've had no word of him. I often wonder where he is. If he is still alive,"

"You imply a responsibility to stay. But, Jason, that can't be the entire story."

"It's part of it, I think. At one time more a part of it than it is now. John and I were the oldest. My sister, Janice, is younger. We still see her occasionally and Martha talks with her quite often. If John had stayed, Martha and I might have gone, I said maybe we didn't because we couldn't. I don't really believe that. The ability seems to be inherent. Man probably had it for a long time before he began to use it. For it to develop time was needed and the longer life gave us time. Perhaps it would have developed even without the longer life if we'd not been so concerned, so fouled up, with our technology. Somewhere we may have taken the wrong turning, accepted the wrong values and permitted our concern with technology to mask our real and valid purpose. The concern with technology may have kept us from knowing what we had. These abilities of ours could not struggle up into our consciousness through the thick layers of machines and cost estimates and all the rest of it. And when we talk about abilities, it's not simply going to the stars. Your people don't go to the stars. There may be no need of you to do so. You have become, instead, a part of your environment, living within its texture and understanding it. It went that way for you…"

"But if you could go, why don't you? Surely you could be away for a little time. The robots.would take care of things. They'd keep the home fires burning, keep the welcome ready for those who wanted to return."

Jason shook his head. "It is too late now. I fall increasingly in love with this house and with these acres as the years go on. I feel a part of it. I'd be lost without the house and land—and Earth. I couldn't live without them. A man can't walk the same land, live in the same house, for almost five thousand years…"

"I know," said Red Cloud. "The band, as its members increased, split up and scattered, becoming many bands. Some are on the prairies, others eastward in the forests. I stick to these two rivers…"

"I am guilty of bad manners," Jason said. "I should have asked first off. How is Mrs. Cloud?"

"Happy. With a new camp to boss, she is in her glory"

"And your sons and grandsons many times removed?"

"Only a few of the grandsons still are with us," Red Cloud said. "The sons and other grandsons are with other bands. We hear from them at times. Running Elk, my grandson thrice removed, was killed by a grizzly about a year ago. A runner came to tell us. Otherwise they all are well and happy."

"I grieve for you," said Jason. "Running Elk was a grandson to be proud of."

Red Cloud bowed his head in thanks. "Mrs. Jason, I gather, is in good health."

Jason nodded. "She spends a lot of time talking with the others. She is most proficient at it. Much more so than I am. Telepathy seems to be second nature to her. Each evening she has much news to tell. There are a lot of us now. I have no idea how many. Martha would know better than I do. She keeps it all in mind. All the relationships, who married whom and so on. Some thousands of us, surely."

"You told me once before, many years ago, that some intelligences had been found in space, but none like us. In the years since we've been gone…"

"You're right," said Jason. "None like us. Some contacts. Some friendly, some not so friendly, some indifferent to us. The most of them so alien to us they set one's teeth on edge. And, of course, the wandering alien travelers that sometimes visit Earth."

"And that is all? No cooperating…"

"No, that isn't all," said Jason. "Something has arisen that is most disturbing. A whiff of something most disturbing. Like a bad smell on the wind. From somewhere out in the center…"

"The center of what, Jason?"

"The center of the galaxy. The core. An intelligence of some sort. We just sniffed the edge of it and that's enough…"

"Hostile?"

"No, not hostile. Cold. Intelligent, too intelligent. Cold and indifferent. Analytical. Oh,hell, I can't tell you. There's no way to tell you. As if an angleworm could sniff the intelligence of a human. More than that. More difference between it and us than there is between man and angleworm."

"It's got you scared?"

"Scared? I guess so. Upset. Apprehensive. Only comfort is that we probably are beneath their notice."

"Then why worry?"

"Not worrying too much. It isn't that. Just that a man feels uncertain knowing there is something like that in the galaxy with him. As if you stumbled across a pit of concentrated evil."

"But it isn't evil."

"I don't think so. I don't know what it is. Neither does anyone else. We just caught a whiff…"

"You haven't detected it? You, yourself?"

"No. Some of the others. Two of the others out in the stars."

"No need to worry, more than likely. Just stay out of the way. I wonder, though—could it have had something to do with the People leaving? It seems unlikely, though. You still have no idea, Jason, of why it happened, why all the People went away."

"None at all," said Jason.

"You were speaking of the aliens that came to Earth…"

"Yes," said Jason. "It is strange how they come to Earth these days. Not many of them, of course. Not many that we know about. Two or three in the last century, although I guess, when you come to think of it, with all the space there is and the distances, that is quite a lot. But they never seemed to come before. It's only happened since the People left. Although it is possible they may have been coming in the old days and were never seen, or if seen, unrecognized for what they were. Maybe we didn't see them because we were unprepared to recognize them. Even if we'd seen them, we would have closed our eyes to them. We'd have felt uncomfortable in the presence of something that we couldn't understand and so, with one grand gesture, we'd have wiped them all away. We would have said they can't be here, they aren't here, we never saw them, and that would be the end of it."

"That may have been it," said Red Cloud. "Or far fewer may have come. We were a turbulent planet, seething with intelligence and at times a rather terrifying kind of intelligence. On a smaller scale, maybe something like that intelligence of yours in the center of the galaxy. Surely not the sort of place a wandering alien would have chosen to sit down to seek a time of rest. For he would have had no rest. In those days there was no rest for anyone."

"You are right, of course," said Jason. "We know it now. I don't suppose there was any way we could have known it then. We got ahead. We progressed…"

"You have talked, I think," said Red Cloud, "with some of the wandering aliens."

"Two or three of them. Once I traveled five hundred miles to talk with one of them, but it was gone by the time I got there. A robot brought the news. I'm not as good as Martha with this business of galactic telepathy, but I can talk with aliens. With some of them, that is. I seem to have the knack for it. Sometimes, though, there is no way of talking. They have no basis for recognizing sound waves as a means of communication and a human, on his part, may not even have the sense to recognize the signals or the mental waves they use for communication. With others of them, even if the means of communication is there, you can't do any talking. There's really nothing to talk about. No common grounds for talking."

"This matter of wandering aliens," said Red Cloud, "is partly why I came. I'd have come anyhow, of course, the first day that I could. But I wanted to tell you that we have an alien here. Up at the head of Cat Den Hollow. Little Wolf found him and came running and I went to have a look."

So this was it, thought Jason; he should have known. All this careful, polite talking on everything except the one thing that Red Cloud had really come to tell him, and finally it was out. It was the way they were; one should expect it of them. The old unhurried way, the tribal protocol, the dignity. To never be excited, to not come charging in, to be leisurely and deliberate and to make ground for decency.

"You tried to talk with him?" he asked.

"No," said Horace Red Cloud. "I can talk with flowers and flowing rivers and they can talk back to me, but an alien—I'd not know how to start."

"All right," said Jason, "I'll amble over and see what it has in mind, if it has anything in mind. That is, if I can talk with it. Was there any indication of how it might have come?"

"It's a teleporter, I would guess. There was no sign of any kind of ship."

"Usually they are," said Jason. "The same as us. A machine of any sort is a cumbersome contraption. Star-roving is nothing new, of course, although at first we thought it was. We thought we had made such a wonderful discovery when the first of us began to develop and employ parapsychic powers. But it was not so wonderful; it was simply something that we'd been too busy, as a technological race, to take the time to look at. And even if someone had thought about it and had tried to talk about it, he would have been ridiculed."

"None of us have star-roved," Red Cloud said. "I'm not sure any of us have any powers at all. We have been so occupied with the world we live in and the secrets that it holds that we may not have tapped the secret resources that we have, if there should be any. But now…"

"I think you have powers and are using them," Jason told him, "to the best of purposes. You know your environment and mesh more closely with it than men ever have before. This must take some sort of psychic instinct. It may not be as romantic as star-roving, but it takes, perhaps, an even greater understanding."

"I thank you for your kindness," Red Cloud said, "and there may be certain truth in what you say. I have a beautiful and very foolish granddaughter-many-times-removed who has only turned her nineteenth year. Perhaps you remember her—the Evening Star."

"Why, of course I do," Jason said, delighted. "When you were away from camp or busy and I came visiting, she would take me over. We went on nature hikes and she showed me birds and flowers and other woodland wonders, and she chattered all the time, most delightfully."

"She still chatters most delightfully, but I am somewhat concerned by her. I think, perhaps, she has some of the brand of psychic power that your clan may hold…"

"You mean star-roving?"

Red Cloud crinkled up his face. "I'm not sure. No, I don't think so. It may be something else. I sense a certain strangeness in her. I suppose I am disturbed by it, although I have no right to be. She has a thirst for knowledge such as I have never seen in any of my people. Not a thirst to know her world, although that is there as well, but a thirst to know outside her world. To know all that's ever happened, all that men have thought. She has read all the books that the band possesses and they are very few…"

Jason raised his arm and swept it in an arc to indicate the room. "There are books here," he said, "if she would come and read them. Down in the basement areas there are other rooms stacked to the ceilings with others of them. She is free to use any that she wishes, but I am reluctant to let any leave this house. Once lost, a book would be irreplaceable."

"I had come prepared to ask," said Red Cloud. "I was leading up to it. Thank you for offering,"

"It pleases me there is someone who might wish to read them. It is a privilege to share them with her, I assure you."

"I suppose," said Red Cloud, "we should have given thought to books, but it's a little late now to do anything about it. There might still be books, of course, although time, I would imagine, has destroyed most of them. Weather and the rodents would have gotten at them. And our people hesitate to go looking for them. We have a great dislike for the ancient places. They are so old and musty and are filled with many ghosts—ghosts of the past that even now we do not like to think about. We have a few books, of course, and treasure them as an ancient heritage. And we make it a point of honor with the past each child is taught to read. But for most of them it is an unpleasant duty only. Until the Evening Star, there have been few who cared to read."

"Would Evening Star," asked Jason, "be willing to come and live with us? For as long as she might like. It would brighten up the house to have a youngster in it and I would undertake to guide her in her reading."

"I shall tell her," Red Cloud said. "She will be delighted. You know, of course, she calls you Uncle Jason."

"No, I did not know," said Jason. "I am honored."

Silence fell upon the two men and they sat there for a moment in the hush of the library. Upon the wall the clock ticked off the seconds, loudly in the silence.

Red Cloud stirred. "Jason, you have kept track of time. Of the years, I mean. You even have a clock. We have no clocks and we've kept no count. Wedidn't bother to. We took each day as it came and lived it to the full. We live not with days, but seasons. And we have not counted seasons."

"Here and there," said Jason, "we may have missed a day or two, or added a day or two—I can't be sure of that. But we have kept count. It's been five thousand years. I'm as old, physically, as my grandfather was when he first wrote in the books. After that he lived for almost three thousand years. If I follow the same schedule, I'll live a full eight thousand years. It does not seem possible, of course. It seems a bit indecent for a man to live eight thousand years."

"Some day," said Red Cloud, "we may know what brought about all this—where the People went to and why we live so long."

"Perhaps," said Jason, "although I have no hope. I have been thinking, Horace…"

"Yes?"

"I could round up a gang of robots and send them down to clear those cornfields for you. They're just messing around, not doing much of anything. I know how you feel about robots, of course…"

"No. Thank you very much. We'll accept the corn and flour and all the rest of it, but we can't accept the help of robots."

"What, actually, have you got against them? Don't you trust them? They won't hang around. They won't bother you. They'll just clear the fields, then leave."

"We feel uneasy with them," Red Cloud said. "They don't fit in with us. They're a reminder of what happened to us when the white men came. When we broke, we broke completely. We kept only a few things. The simple metal tools, the plow, a better economic sense—we no longer feast one day and starve the next as the Indians did in many instances before the white men came. We went back to the old woods life, the old plains life. We went on our own; we have to keep it that way."

"I think I understand."

"I'm not entirely sure we trust them, either," Red Cloud said, "Not completely. Maybe the ones you have here, working in your fields for you and doing other things, may be all right. But I have my reservations about some of the wild ones. I told you, didn't I, that there is a gang of them up the river, at the site of some old city…"

"Yes, I remember that you did. Minneapolis and St. Paul. You saw them many, many years ago. They were building something."

"They still are building it," said Red Cloud. "We stopped on the way downstream and had a look—a far-off look. There are more of them than ever and they still are building. One great building, although it doesn't look like a building. The robots wouldn't be building a house, would they?"

"I don't think so. Not for themselves. They laugh at weather. They're made of some sort of almost indestructible alloy. It doesn't rust, it doesn't wear, it resists almost everything. Weather, temperature, rain… none of them mean a thing to them."

"We didn't hang around too long," said Red Cloud. "We stayed a good ways off. We used glasses, but still couldn't see too much. We were scared, I guess. Uncomfortable. We got out of there once we had a look, I don't suppose there is any real danger, but we took no chances."