The Monadic Universe

The gnome was very old, but no one had yet determined quite how old. And there seemed no way to find out. The gnome had never volunteered any information about his past. In the one hundred years of his imprisonment he had never asked the caretaker for anything.

The small staff of Earthmen and humanoids generally avoided him. Sometimes they would watch his small figure standing looking up at the giant disk of Antares hanging blood red on the horizon, and they would wonder what he was thinking.

The most important fact about the alien was that sometime in the remote past he had been responsible for the construction of the solar system and the emergence of intelligent life on earth.

—From Heathen God, only one of the fascinating stories in this outstanding collection