The Creator and Other Stories
Clifford D. Simak
EDITORIAL REVIEW:
A collection of short tales by the author of City and Grotto of the Dancing Deer includes the title story, in which God is depicted as an experimental scientist killed by his own creation, and others.
Contents:
The Creator
Shotgun Cure
All the Traps of Earth
Death Scene
Reunion on Ganymede
The Money Tree
Party Line
The Answers
The Thing in the Stone
Clifford D. Simak
The Creator and Other Stories
Introduction
This is the sixth collection of the short stories of Clifford D. Simak that I have had the privilege and pleasure of editing. The pleasure lies in being able to reveal the stories to the modern science fiction audience. Some of these tales have been included in collections assembled by Cliff himself or by others, but those collections (which I myself in my time eagerly bought) are now not available. Some tales are from my own library, some are mined from the magazines through the assistance of Joyce Day of the Science Fiction Foundation (to whom UK sf lovers should be grateful), and others have come from the considerable collection of a fellow-enthusiast here in Aberdeen. To him I owe a considerable debt.
The privilege lies in being able to work with the stories of one of my favourite authors. I well remember the trepidation with which I first wrote to CDS, the courtesy of his reply, and then meeting for breakfast in Hopkins House Motor Hotel in Minnetonka/Minneapolis in 1981. I was nervous and he was (I think) slightly anxious lest he had made a mistake in allowing access to this Scottish academic lawyer. But we got on well: our interests and enthusiasms meshed — so did our dislikes. He bore me off to his house and I still recall asking if the Way Station had anything to do with Andrew Wyeth's painting 'Christina's World' and the joy with which Cliff dug out from a pile of books on the coffee table in front of us an album of Wyeth's paintings. It was indeed so: Way Station is not unconnected with that weatherbeaten-grey slatted house on the rise above the meadow.
We corresponded for the rest of Cliff's life, with all the affection of shared interest and enjoyment. I still cannot bring myself to erase from my computer disc the letter I wrote on 26 April 1988, speaking of the spring: two days later a colleague asked if I had seen word of Cliff's death. Cliff must have died as I was writing. The news was carried in the Press and Journal, a newspaper circulating in the northern half of Scotland, and a full obituary ran in the London Times (a courtesy extended first to James Blish in 1975 and two weeks after Cliff to Robert Heinlein).
Like others I grieved for the passing of one whose niche in sf is unique, and the flavour of whose tales has never been approached. Indeed, the Simak style has never been successfully emulated. Not for nothing has he been termed the pastoral poet of sf. His voice, his way of looking at things and the quiet sanity and morality of even his most abstruse flights of fancy, were unique in his lifetime. Modern sf would be the healthier were someone filling his shoes, but, though there is some promise, I see no true successor to CDS. Were justification needed — and it is not, for the tales stand on their own — that alone would justify these collections.
CDS's skill as a weaver of tales is incontrovertible. He was a newspaperman for the bulk of his long working life, yet, despite a very busy and successful professional life he published over two hundred stories and twenty-seven novels. City of 1952 and Way Station of 1963 are perhaps the best known novels. City won the International Fantasy Award in 1953 and his other awards and nominations from the sf writing and the sf reading communities include three Hugos (for The Big Front Yard', 1959; Way Station, 1964; and The Grotto of the Dancing Deer', 1980) and a Nebula (for The Grotto of the Dancing Deer', 1980 — which also won the Locus short story award for that year). In 1977 he received the Nebula Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America as well as the Jupiter Award (for A Heritage of Stars, 1977). Cliff retired in 1976, but kept on writing, his last novel being Highway of Eternity (1986). He died in April 1988.
I said CDS's skill as a weaver of tales is incontrovertible. The wording was deliberate, for it is the story not the style that usually sticks in the mind. His style is workmanlike, efficiently transmitting ideas but no more. Unlike some more modern writers, in CDS the style is not part of the experience. On the contrary, the unobtrusiveness of his writing reflects his professional training and serves to enhance the ideas he offers. It is the style of the story-teller of old, grasping your attention without histrionic display.
The ideas, the people and the Simak locations (often the countryside) linger in the mind. Like all good tellers of tales, one forgets the precise words, but the flavour of the story persists. In Tolkein's terms the story becomes myth, for the story remains while its precise formulation in words vanishes.
Practice alone will not produce good stories which so transcend their immediate vehicle. A basic skill is needed, though that is a skill which itself needs to be honed by frequent practice. Cliff was always thinking of stories — in his last letter to me he spoke of regret that he had not the strength to write, but he was enjoying thinking of fresh stories. He had done that from an early age, his brother Carson often being the audience.
CDS was formed by his early life in the rural communities of south-west Wisconsin. He was born on the ridge country of Millville township above the Wisconsin river. He was reared on his father's farm there, and the 'stone house' his father built still gazes over to Prairie du Chien. He was educated in Patch Grove, and taught school for a few years in other small communities in the neighbourhood. All that grounded his country of the imagination, 'Simak Country', which is as real as the inventions of others. I have gone over this ground, guided by friends, by Cliff's instruction and by his brother Carson, and it is startling and instructive to recognise some scenes precisely as delineated, and in others to see how the artist has shifted and shaped to his requirements. In this collection, The Thing in the Stone' is embedded m the Platteville Limestone of Simak coutry, and Cat Den
Point and the tree to the cave, although moved laterally, are features of the Simak farm.
Simak country is also the people that live there. Not for nothing does Daniel find his place in a rural community as he flees 'All the Traps of Earth'. Nor is it an accident that those who know The Answers' live simply. The caring and an underlying respect for traditional ways and moral values which suffuse most of the stories can be traced to rural community life. On the other hand the raw evil that can also lurk in the country community is also known and exposed in, for example, the Adams family in The Thing in the Stone'. And, from a different side — Cliffs long interest in government — there is Brown and Russell in 'Party Line'.
One reads stories for different reasons. In this collection I have tried to provide a representative 'buffet' for various tastes and requirements. For fun try 'Reunion on Ganymede' and The Money Tree'. For relaxation: try 'All the Traps of Earth'. But, having made my selection, I am conscious that most of the stories here touch something deeper. Cliff usually has a secondary (or primary, but concealed) element, an interest which he approaches most fully in the novels A Choice of Gods and Project Pope. There is a questioning and a probing of fundamental matters — What is it all about? and, What am I for? There is also the notion of some higher power, being or purpose. Theologically these are the questions of the nature of existence together with the sense of the numinous, but CDS presents them in story form — a medium which can often be more illuminating than the tomes of the professionals. Consider 'Death Scene' and The Answers' as a pair. T
hey involve a serenity which has its own loveliness whether or not that is how you yourself would react to the facts of the story.
CDS was not always serene in his attitude to such questions. The Creator' is very different. In its time it was notorious. CDS wrote it in 1933 or '34 after he had more or less decided that his dalliance with sf was over. The editor W.L. Crawford persuaded him to write one more. It was not the first time CDS had brushed with the orthodoxies of religion (see The Voice in the Void' of 1932), but this presentation of God as a none too pleasant experimental scientist eventually killed by his creation was, for its time, startling. And, though it bears the stamp of its era, and though it is a product of a young writer, it stands as a stimulus to thought even today.
At the other end of the book, look at The Thing in the Stone'. Here an archetypal Simak hero makes friends with what… the faithful pet of something that may be close to being a fallen angel?
But that story also is typical of CDS's work. Wallace Daniels is hurt, his wife and daughter taken from him by an accident which injured him as well and has given him an ability to see and move in the past. He has retreated to the (Simak) farm among the hills, and walks the ridges, fields and streams. (Cat Den Point, as I said, was on the Simak farm.) In the cave he becomes aware of the Thing, trapped and dreaming. He is trapped there by the malice of man and yet attempts to help whatever it is he can 'hear', and thus gains himself both a friend and rescue from his own predicament. This is pure Simak. Theme and counterpoint, pacing and orchestration — unmistakable and satisfying.
Other familiar Simak elements are in these pages. In 'Party Line' there are the Listeners to the Stars, people you would find in Ring Around the Sun (1952) or Project Pope (1986). Indeed in both 'Party Line' and Project Pope a Mary finds heaven, though how differently in the story here. Again the robot, Richard Daniel, ranks with Jenkins, Hezekiah and Cardinal Theodosius, and Doctor Kelly, the country doctor has other incarnations in other stories.
And ever and again there is the idea, the image, the thought that strikes deep. Allow yourself to consider Richard Daniel on the outside of the spaceship heading through hyperspace and becoming one with the Universe. Consider also his new ability to see and adjust diagrams. How will he benefit his new home? Go from there to 'Shotgun Cure' and think again — is intelligence a disease we would be better to have cured? Would you decide as Doc Kelly does?
I regret that there will be no more Simak stories; that he was not able even to put on tape the thoughts of his last few months. But here is a representative selection of his legacy to us. I hope you will enjoy them.
F. Lyall.
Aberdeen, Scotland. August, 1993.
The Creator
FOREWORD
This is written in the elder days as the Earth rides close to the rim of eternity, edging nearer to the dying Sun, into which her two inner companions of the solar system have already plunged to a fiery death. The Twilight of the Gods is history; and our planet drifts on and on into that oblivion from which nothing escapes, to which time itself may be dedicated in the final cosmic reckoning.
Old Earth, pacing her death march down the corridors of the heavens, turns more slowly upon her axis. Her days have lengthened as she crawls sadly to her tomb, shrouded only in the shreds of her former atmosphere. Because her air has thinned, her sky has lost its cheerful blue depths and she is arched with a dreary gray, which hovers close to the surface, as if the horrors of outer space were pressing close, like ravening wolves, upon the flanks of this ancient monarch of the heavens. When night creeps upon her, stranger stars blaze out like a ring of savage eyes closing in upon a dying campfire.
Earth must mourn her passing for she has stripped herself of all her gaudy finery and proud trappings. Upon her illimitable deserts and twisted ranges she has set up strange land sculptures. And these must be temples and altars before which she, not forgetting the powers of good and evil throughout the cosmos, prays in her last hours, like a dying man returning to his old faith. Mournful breezes Play a hymn of futility across her barren reaches of sand and rocky ledges. The waters of the empty oceans beat out upon the treeless, bleak and age-worn coast a march that is the last brave gesture of an ancient planet which has served its purpose and treads the path to Nirvana.
Little half-men and women, final survivors of a great race, which they remember only through legends handed down from father to son, burrow gnomelike in the bowels of the planet which has mothered their seed from dim days when the thing which was destined to rule over all his fellow creatures crawled in the slime of primal seas. A tired race, they wait for the day legend tells them will come, when the sun blazes anew in the sky and grass grows green upon the barren deserts once again. But I know this day will never come, although I would not disillusion them. I know their legends lie, but why should I destroy the only solid thing they have left to round out their colorless life with the everlasting phenomena of hope?
For these little folks have been kind to me and there is a bloodbond between us that even the passing of a million years cannot erase. They think me a god, a messenger that the day they have awaited so long is near. I regret in time to come they must know me as a false prophet.
There is no point in writing these words. My little friends asked me what I do and why I do it and do not seem to understand when I explain. They do not comprehend my purpose in making quaint marks and signs upon the well-tanned pelts of the little rodents which overrun their burrows. All they understand is that when I have finished my labor they must take the skins and treasure them as a sacred trust I have left in their hands.
I have no hope the things I record will ever be read. I write my experiences in the same spirit and with the same bewildered purpose which must have characterized the first ancestor who chipped a runic message upon a stone.
I realize that I write the last manuscript. Earth's proud cities have fallen into mounds of dust. The roads that once crossed her surface have disappeared without a trace. No wheels turn, no engines drone. The last tribe of the human race crouches in its caves, watching for the day that will never come.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS
There may be some who would claim that Scott Marston and I have blasphemed, that we probed too deeply into mysteries where we had no right.
But be that as it may, I do not regret what we did and I am certain that Scott Marston, wherever he may be, feels as I do, without regrets.
We began our friendship at a little college in California. We were naturally drawn together by the similitude of our life, the affinity of our natures. Although our lines of study were widely separated (he majored in science and I in psychology), we both pursued our education for the pure love of learning rather than with a thought of what education might do toward earning a living.
We eschewed the society of the campus, engaging in none of the frivolities of the student body. We spent happy hours in the library and study hall. Our discussions were ponderous and untouched by thought of the college life which flowed about us in all its colorful pageantry.
In our last two years we roomed together. As we were poor, our quarters were shabby, but this never occurred to us. Our entire life was embraced in our studies. We were fired with the true spirit of research.
Inevitably, we finally narrowed our research down to definite lines. Scott, intrigued by the enigma of time, devoted more and more of his leisure moments to the study of that inscrutable element. He found that very little was known of it, beyond the perplexing equations set up by equally perplexed savants.
I wandered into as remote paths, the study of psycho-physics and hypnology. I followed my research in hypnology until I came to the point where the mass of facts I had accumulated trapped me in a jungle of various diametrically opposed conclusions, many of which verged upon the occult.
It was at the insistence of my friend that I finally sought a solution in the material rather than the psychic world. He argued that if I were to make any real progress I must follow the dictate of pu
re, cold science rather than the elusive will-o'-the-wisp of an unproven shadow existence.
At length, having completed our required education, we were offered positions as instructors, he in physics and I in psychology. We eagerly accepted, as neither of us had any wish to change the routine of our lives.
Our new status in life changed our mode of living not at all. We continued to dwell in our shabby quarters, we ate at the same restaurant, we had our nightly discussions. The fact that we were no longer students in the generally accepted term of the word made no iota of difference to our research and study.
It was in the second year after we had been appointed instructors that I finally stumbled upon my 'consciousness unit' theory. Gradually I worked it out with the enthusiastic moral support of my friend, who rendered me what assistance he could.
The theory was beautiful in simplicity. It was based upon the hypothesis that a dream is an expression of one's consciousness, that it is one's second self going forth to adventure and travel. When the physical being is at rest the consciousness is released and can travel and adventure at will within certain limits.
I went one step further, however. I assumed that the consciousness actually does travel, that certain infinitesimal parts of one's brain do actually escape to visit the strange places and encounter the odd events of which one dreams.
This was taking dreams out of the psychic world to which they had formerly been relegated and placing them on a solid scientific basis.
I speak of my theory as a 'consciousness units' theory. Scott and I spoke of the units as 'consciousness cells,' although we were aware they could not possibly be cells. I thought of them as highly specialized electrons, despite the fact that it appeared ridiculous to suspect electrons of specialization.
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