A Choice of Gods

9

She sat and listened to the voices of the books— or, rather, perhaps, to the voices of the men who had written all the books, strange, grave voices far off in time, speaking from the depths of time, the distant mumble of many cultivated voices, without words, but with meaning and with thought instead of words, and she had never thought, she told herself, it could be anything like this. The trees had words to speak and the flowers a meaning and the little people of the woods often talked to her and the river and the running streams had music and a magic that surpassed understanding. But this was because they were living things—yes, even the river and the brook could be thought of as living things. Could it be that books were living, too?

She had never known there could be so many books, a large room, floor to ceiling, lined with rows of books, and many times that number, she had been told by the funny little robot, Thatcher, stored away in basement rooms. But the strangest thing of all was that she could think of a robot as being a funny sort of creature—almost as if he were a man. No great black horror that stalked the evening skyline, no midnight wraith out of the place of dreams; if not a man at least a manlike being with a gentle voice

Perhaps it had been something he had said: "Here you can trace and chart the path of man up from darkest night." Saying it proudly, as if he were a man himself and alone, in terror and in hope, had trod that very path.

The voices of the books kept mumbling m the dimness of the room while rain ran down the windows—a companionable muttering that must keep on forever, the ghostly conversations of long-dead writers whose works lined the study walls. Was it all imagination, she asked herself, or did others hear them, too—did Uncle Jason sometimes hear them as he sat here by himself? Although she knew, even as she wondered it, that this was something she could never ask. Or could it be heard by no one but herself, hearing it as she had heard the voice of Old Grandfather Oak on that long-gone summer day before the tribe had gone into the wild rice country, as she this very day had sensed the lifting of the arms and the benediction?

As she sat there, at a small desk in one corner of the room, with the book opened on the desk (not the big desk where Uncle Jason sat to write the chronicles), listening to the wind running in the eaves, watching the rain sluice down the windows from which Thatcher had drawn the drapes with the passing of the morning sun, she moved into another place, or seemed to move into another place, although the room remained. In this place were many people, or at least the shadows of many people, and many other desks and far distant times and places, although the distance of the times and places seemed less than they should have been, as if the veils of time and space had grown very thin and were ready to dissolve, so that she sat, an observer to a great event—the running together of all time and space so that the both of them became almost nonexistent, no longer caging men and events into separate cells, but running them all together, as if everything had happened all at once and in the self-same area, with the past crowding close upon the future within the confines of a tiny point of existence that, for convenience, might be called the present. Frightened at what was happening, she nevertheless glimpsed for a terrible, sublime moment all the causes and effects, all the direction and the purpose, all the agony and glory that had driven men to write all the billions of words that stood stacked within the room. Glimpsed it all without understanding, with no time or capacity for an understanding, understanding only that what had happened in the minds of men to drive them to create all the mumbled, scribbled, burning words had not been so much the work of many individual minds as the impact of a pattern of existence upon the minds of all mankind.

The spell (if it were no more than a spell) was broken almost immediately, with Thatcher coming through the door and padding across the room toward her, carrying a tray which he put down upon the desk.

"This is slightly delayed, miss," he apologized. "Just as I was about to bring it Nicodemus from the monastery came rushing in to say that hot soup and blankets and many other things were needed for the comfort of an injured pilgrim."

A glass of milk, a jar of wild gooseberry jam, slices of buttered bread and a slab of honey cake rested on the tray. "It is not elaborate," said Thatcher. "It is not as splendid as a guest of this house has reason to expect, but taking care of the monastery's needs, I did not have the time to do full justice to it."

"It is more than adequate," said Evening Star. "I had not expected such a kindness. Busy as you were, you should not have bothered."

"Miss," said Thatcher, "through the centuries it has been my pleasure and responsibility to operate this household according to certain standards that have not varied through all the days of my stewardship. I am only sorry that the procedure should, for the first time, have been upset on your first day here."

"Never mind," she told him. "You said a pilgrim. Do pilgrims often come to the monastery? I have never heard of them."

"This one," Thatcher said, "is the first there ever was. And I am not sure that he is a pilgrim, although that is what Nicodemus called him. A mere wanderer, no doubt, although that is memorable in itself, for never before has there been a human wanderer. A young man, almost naked, as Nicodemus tells it, with a bear-claw necklace encircling his throat."

She sat stiff and straight, remembering the man who had stood that morning on the bluff top with her.

"Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

"I do not think so," Thatcher told her. "He sought refuge in the monastery from the storm. When he opened the gate, the wind caught it and it struck him. He is very much alive."

"He is a good man," said Evening Star, "and a very simple man. He cannot even read. He thinks the stars are no more than points of light shining in the sky. But he can sense a tree..»

And stopped, confused, for she must not talk about the tree. She must learn to guard her tongue.

"Miss, you know this human?"

"No. I mean I do not know him. I saw him for a moment and talked with him this morning. He said he was coming here. He was seeking something and thought he might find it here."

"All humans seek for something," Thatcher said. "We robots are quite different. We are content to serve."