A Choice of Gods

11

(Excerpt from journal entry of April 19, 6135)… Today we planted the trees that Robert brought back from one of the stars far out toward the Rim, We planted them most carefully on the little knoll halfway between the House and the monastery. The robots planted them, of course, but we were there to provide unneeded supervision, making, in effect, a quiet ceremony of it. There was Martha and myself and Robert and while we were about it, Andrew and Margaret and their children happened to drop in and Thatcher sent them out to us and we made quite a party of it.

I wonder, sitting here tonight, how the trees willthrive. It is not the first time we have tried to introduce an alien plant to the soil of Earth. There were, for example, the pocketful of cereal grains that Justin carried with him from out Polaris way and the tubers that Celia gathered in another of the Rim systems. Either one of them would have provided another welcome food plant to add to those we have, but in each case we lost them, although the grain dragged out through several seasons, producing less and less, until in the final year we planted the little that we had and it failed to germinate. There is, I suspect, lacking in our soil some vital factor, perhaps the absence of certain minerals, or perhaps the absence of an alien bacteria or little microscopic animal life forms that may be necessary to the growth of alien plants.

We shall lavish great care on the trees, of course, and shall watch them closely, for if we can keep them alive and thriving it will be a wondrous thing. Robert calls them music trees and says that on their native planet there are great groves of them and that in the evening hours they play their concerts, although why they should play a concert is very hard to tell, for there lives upon this planet no other form of life with an intellectual capacity to appreciate good music. Perhaps they play it for themselves, or perhaps for one another, with one grove listening in deep appreciation while its neighbor grove takes over for the evening.

I would suspect that there might be other reasons for the playing that Robert has not caught, being content to sit and listen and not disposed to inquire too deeply into the reason for the music. But when I try to think of those other possible reasons, there is not a single one that occurs to me. We are too limited, of course, in our experience and history, to attempt to understand the purposes of the other life forms that live within the galaxy.

Robert was able to bring to Earth only a half dozen of the trees, little saplings three feet high or so, which he had dug most carefully, using his clothing to ball the roots, so that he arrived on Earth quite naked. My clothes are somewhat large for him, but being the kind of man he is, always ready to laugh, even at himself, he does not seem to mind. The robots are now engaged in making him a wardrobe and he'll leave Earth much better equipped, garmentwise, than he had been when he stripped himself to ball the trees.

We have no reasonable expectations, of course, that the trees will survive, but the hope they will is good to think upon. Thinking back, it is so long since I have heard music, of any sort, that it is difficult to remember what it might be like. Neither Martha nor myself has any musical ability. Only a couple of the others of the original group had a musical sense and they are long gone from Earth. Years ago, seized with a great idea, I read enough about music to understand some of the basics of its playing and made an attempt to have the robots construct instruments, which did not turn out too well, and then to play them, which turned out even worse. Apparently the robots, or at least the ones on this farm, have no more musical ability than I. In the days of our youth most of the music was electronically recorded and since the Disappearance there has been no way in which it can be reproduced. As a matter of fact, my grandfather, realizing this, when he collected books and art, made no effort to collect any tapes, although I believe that in one of the basement vaults there is a respectable collection of musical scores, the old gentleman hoping, perhaps, that in the years to come there might be those with some musical aptitude who would find use for them…