A Canticle For Leibowitz l-1

by Walter M. Miller

  “What is it?” the robber asked. “A charm?” He studied the two documents together for a time. “Oh! One is a ghost of the other. What magic is this?” He stared at Brother Francis with suspicious gray eyes. “What is it called?”

  “Uh — Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B,” the monk stammered.

  The robber, who had been looking at the documents upside down, could nevertheless see that one diagram involved a figure-background reversal of the other-an effect which seemed to intrigue him as much as the gold leaf. He traced out the similarities in design with a short and dirty forefinger, leaving a faint smudge on the illuminated lambskin. Francis held back tears.

  “Please!” the monk gasped. “The gold is so thin, it’s worth nothing to speak of. Weigh it in your hand. The whole thing weighs no more than the paper itself. It’s of no use to you. Please, sir, take my clothing instead. Take the donkey, take my bindlestiff. Take whatever you will, but leave me these. They mean nothing to you.”

  The robber’s gray gaze was meditative. He watched the monk’s agitation and rubbed his jaw. “I’ll let you keep your clothes and your donkey and everything except this,” he offered. “I’ll just take the charms, then.”

  “For the love of God, sir, then kill me tool” Brother Francis wailed.

  The robber snickered. “We’ll see. Tell me what they’re for.”

  “Nothing. One is a memento of a man long dead. An ancient. The other is only a copy.”

  “What good are they to you?”

  Francis closed his eyes for a moment and tried to think of a way to explain. “You know the forest tribes? How they venerate their ancestors?”

  The gray eyes of the robber flashed angrily for a moment.

  “We despise our ancestors,” he barked. “Cursed be they who gave us birth!”

  “Cursed, cursed!” echoed one of the shrouded archers on the hillside.

  “You know who we are? Where we are from?”

  Francis nodded. “I meant no offense. The ancient whose relic this is — he is not our ancestor. He was our teacher of old. We venerate his memory. This is only like a keepsake, no more.”

  “What about the copy?”

  “I made it myself. Please, sir, it took me fifteen years. It’s nothing to you. Please — you wouldn’t take fifteen years of a man’s life — for no reason?”

  “Fifteen years?” The robber threw back his head and howled with laughter. “You spent fifteen years making that?”

  “Oh, but—” Francis was suddenly silent. His eyes swung toward the robber’s stubby forefinger. The finger was tapping the original blueprint.

  “That took you fifteen years? And it’s almost ugly beside the other.” He slapped his paunch and between guffaws kept pointing at the relic. “Ha! Fifteen years! So that’s what you do way out there!Why? What is the dark ghost-image good for? Fifteen years to make that! Ho ho! What a woman’s work!”

  Brother Francis watched him in stunned silence. That the robber should mistake the sacred relic itself for the copy of the relic left him too shocked to reply.

  Still laughing, the robber took both documents in his hands and prepared to rip them both in half.

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph!” the monk screamed and went to his knees in the trail. “For the love of God, sir!”

  The robber tossed the papers on the ground. I’ll wrestle you for them!” he offered sportingly. “Those against my blade.”

  “Done,” said Francis impulsively, thinking that a contest would at least afford Heaven a chance to intervene in an unobtrusive way. O God, Thou who strengthened Jacob so that he overcame the angel on the rock…

  They squared off. Brother Francis crossed himself. The robber took his knife from his belt-thong and tossed it after the papers. They circled.

  Three seconds later, the monk lay groaning on the flat of his back under a short mountain of muscle. A sharp rock seemed to be severing his spine.

  “Heh-heh,” said the robber, and arose to reclaim his knife and roll up the documents.

  Hands folded as if in prayer, Brother Francis crept after him on his knees, begging at the top of his lungs. “Please, then, take only one, not both! Please!”

  “You’ve got to buy it back now,” the robber chortled. “I won them fair enough.”

  “I have nothing, I am poor!”

  “That’s all right if you want them that bad, you’ll get gold. Two heklos of gold, that’s the ransom. Bring it here any time. I’ll tuck your things in my shanty. You want them back, just bring the gold.”

  “Listen, they’re important to other people, not to me. I was taking them to the Pope. Maybe they’ll pay you for the important one. But let me have the other one just to show them. It’s of no importance at all.”

  The robber laughed over his shoulder. “I believe you’d kiss a boot to get it back.”

  Brother Francis caught up with him and fervently kissed his boot.

  This proved too much for even such a fellow as the robber. He shoved the monk away with his foot, separated the two papers, and flung one of them in Francis’ face with a curse. He climbed aboard the monk’s donkey and started riding it up the slope toward the ambush. Brother Francis snatched up the precious document and hiked along beside the robber, thanking him profusely and blessing him repeatedly while the robber guided the ass toward the shrouded archers.

  “Fifteen years!” the robber snorted, and again shoved Francis away with his foot. “Begone!” He waved the illuminated splendor aloft in the sunlight. “Remember — two heklos of gold’ll ransom your keepsake. And tell your Pope I won it fair.”

  Francis stopped climbing. He sent a glowing cross of benediction after the departing bandit and quietly praised God for the existence of such selfless robbers, who could make such an ignorant mistake. He fondled the original blueprint lovingly as he hiked away down the trail. The robber was proudly displaying the beautiful commemoration to his mutant companions on the hill.

  “Eat! Eat” said one of them, petting the donkey.

  “Ride, ride,” corrected the robber. “Eat later.”

  But when Brother Francis had left them far behind, a great sadness gradually engulfed him. The taunting voice still rang in his ears. Fifteen years! So that’s what youdo over there! Fifteen years! What a woman’s work! Ho ho ho ho…

  The robber had made a mistake. But the fifteen years were gone anyhow, and with it all the love and torment that had gone into the commemoration.

  Cloistered as he had been, Francis had become unaccustomed to the ways of the outside world, to its harsh habits and curt attitudes. He found his heart deeply troubled by the robber’s mockery. He thought of Brother Jeris’ gentler mockery of earlier years. Maybe Brother Jeris had been right.

  His head hung low in his hood as he traveled slowly on.

  At least there was the original relic. At least.

  11

  The hour had come. Brother Francis, in his simple monk’s habit, had never felt less important than at that moment, as he knelt in the majestic basilica before the beginning of the ceremony. The stately movements, the vivid swirls of color, the sounds which accompanied the ceremonious preparations for ceremony, already seemed liturgical in spirit, makingit difficult to bear in mind that nothing of importance was happening yet. Bishops, monsignori, cardinals, priests, and various lay-functionaries in elegant, antiquated dress moved to and fro in the great church, but their comings and goings were graceful clockwork which never paused, stumbled, or changed its mind to rush in the other direction. A sampetrius entered the basilica; so grandly was he attired that Francis at first mistook the cathedral workman for a prelate. The sampetrius carried a footstool. He carried it with such casual pomp that the monk, if he had not been kneeling, might have genuflected as the object drifted by. The sampetrius dropped to one knee before the high altar, then crossed to the papal throne where he substituted the new footstool for one which seemed to have a loose leg; thereupon, he departed by the same route as he had come. Br
other Francis marveled at the studied elegance of movement that accompanied even the trivial. No one hurried. No one minced or fumbled. No motion occurred which did not quietly contribute to the dignity and overpowering beauty of this ancient place, even as the motionless statues and paintings contributed to it. Even the whisper of one’s breathing seemed to echo faintly from distant apses.

  Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est, et porta caeli; terrible indeed, House of God, Gate of Heaven!

  Some of the statues were alive, he observed after a time. A suit of armor stood against the wall a few yards to his left. Its mailed fist held the staff of a gleaming battle-ax. Not even the plume of its helmet had stirred during the time Brother Francis had been kneeling there. A dozen identical suits of armor stood at intervals along the walls. Only after seeing a horsefly crawl through the visor of the “statue” on his left did he suspect that the warlike husk contained an occupant. His eye could detect no motion, but the armor emitted a few metallic creaks while it harbored the horsefly. These, then, must he the papal guard, so renowned in knightly battle: the small private army of God’s First Vicar.

  A captain of the guard was making a stately tour of his men. For the first time, the statue moved. It lifted its visor in salute. The captain thoughtfully paused and used his kerchief to brush the horsefly from the forehead of the expressionless face inside the helmet before passing on. The statue lowered its visor and resumed its immobility.

  The stately decor of the basilica was briefly marred by the entrance of pilgrim throngs. The throngs were well organized and efficiently ushered, but they were patently strangers to this place. Most of them seemed to tread on tiptoe to their stations, cautious to create no sound and as little movement as possible, unlike the sampetrii and New Roman clergy who made sound and motion eloquent. Here and there among the pilgrims someone stifled a cough or stumbled.

  Suddenly the basilica became warlike, as the guard was strengthened. A new troop of mailed statues tramped into the sanctuary itself, dropped to one knee, and tilted their pike-staffs, saluting the altar before taking their posts. Two of them stood flanking the papal throne. A third fell to his knees at the throne’s right hand; he remained kneeling there with the sword of Peter lying across his upraised palms. The tableau became motionless again, except for occasional dancing of flame among the altar candles.

  Upon the hallowed silence burst a sudden peal of trumpets.

  The sound’s intensity mounted until the throbbing Ta-ra Ta-ra-raa could be felt upon one’s face and grew painful to the ears. The voice of the trumpets was not musical but annunciatory. The first notes began in mid-scale, then climbed slowly in pitch, intensity, and urgency, until the monk’s scalp crawled, and there seemed to be nothing at all in the basilica but the explosion of the tubas.

  Then, dead silence — followed by the cry of a tenor:

  FIRST CANTOR: “Appropinquat agnis pastor et ovibus pascendis.”

  SECOND CANTOR: “Genua nunc flectantur omnia.”

  FIRST CANTOR : “Jussit olim Jesus Petrum pascere gregem Domini.”

  SECOND CANTOR: “Ecce Petrus Pontifex Maximus.”

  FIRST CANTOR: “Gaudeat igitur populus Christi, et gratias agat Domino.”

  SECOND CANTOR: “Nam docebimur a Spiritu sancto.”

  CHOIR: “Alleluia, alleluia—”

  The crowd arose and then knelt in a slow wave that followed the movement of the chair containing the frail old man in white who gestured his blessings to the people as the gold, black, purple, and red procession moved him slowly toward the throne. Breath kept choking up in the throat of the small monk from a distant abbey in a distant desert. It was impossible to see everything that was happening, so overwhelming was the tide of music and motion, drowning one’s senses and sweeping the mind along willy-nilly toward that which was soon to come.

  The ceremony was brief. Its intensity would have become unendurable had it been longer. A monsignor — Malfreddo Aguerra, the Saint’s advocate himself, Brother Francis observed — approached the throne and knelt. After a brief silence, he voiced his plea in plain chant.

  “Sancte pater, ab Sapientia summa petimus ut ille Beatus Leibowitz cujus miracula mirati sunt multi…”

  The request called upon Leo to enlighten his people by solemn definition concerning the pious belief that the Beatus Leibowitz was indeed a saint, worthy of the dulia of the Church as well as the veneration of the faithful.

  “Gratissima Nobis causa, fili,” the voice of the old man in white sang in response, explaining that his own heart’s desire was to announce by solemn proclamation that the blessed Martyr was among the saints, but also that it was by divine guidance alone, sub ducatu sancti Spititus, that he might comply with Aguerra’s request. He asked all to pray for that guidance.

  Again the thunder of the choir filled the basilica with the Litany of the Saints: “Father-of-Heaven, God, have mercy on us. Son, Repurchaser-of-the-World, God, have mercy on us. Ghost-Most-Holy, God, have mercy on us. O Sacred Three-foldhood, God-One-and-Only, miserere nobis! Holy Mary, pray for us. Sancta Dei Genitrix, ora pro nobis. Sancta Virgo virginum, ora pro nobis…” The thunder of the litany continued. Francis looked up at a painting of the Blessed Leibowitz, newly unveiled. The fresco was of heroic proportions. It portrayed the trial of the Beatus before the mob, but the face was not wryly smiling as it smiled in Fingo’s work. It was, however, majestic, Francis thought, and in keeping with the rest of the basilica.

  “Omnes sancti Martyres, orate pro nobis…”

  When the litany was finished, again Monsignor Malfreddo Aguerra made his plea to the Pope, asking that the name of Isaac Edward Leibowitz be formally enrolled in the Calendar of Saints. Again the guiding Spirit was invoked, as the Pope chanted the Veni, Creator Spiritus.

  And yet a third time Malfreddo Aguerra pleaded for the proclamation.

  “Surgat ergo Petros ipse.…”

  At last it came. The twenty-first Leo intoned the decision of the Church, rendered under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, proclaiming the existing fact that an ancient and rather obscure technician named Leibowitz was truly a saint in Heaven, whose powerful intercession might, and of right ought to be, reverently implored. A feast day was named for a Mass in his honor.

  “Holy Leibowitz, intercede for us,” Brother Francis breathed with the others.

  After a brief prayer, the choir burst into the Te Deum. After a Mass honoring the new saint, it was finished.

  Escorted by two scarlet-liveried sedarii of the outer palace, the small party of pilgrims passed though a seemingly endless sequence of corridors and antechambers, halting occasionally before the ornate table of some new official who examined credentials and goose-quilled his signature on a licet adire for a sedarius to hand to the next official, whose title grew progressively longer and less pronounceable as the party proceeded. Brother Francis was shivering. Among his fellow pilgrims were two bishops, a man wearing ermine and gold, a clan chief of the forest people, converted but still wearing the panther skin tunic and panther headgear of his tribal totem, a leather-clad simpleton carrying a hooded peregrine falcon on one wrist — evidently as a gift to the Holy Father — and several women, all of whom seemed to be wives or concubines — as best Francis could judge by their actions — of the “converted” clan chief of the panther people; or perhaps they were ex-concubines put away by canon but not by tribal custom.

  After climbing the scala caelestis, the pilgrims were welcomed by the somberly clad ca meralis gestor and ushered into the small anteroom of the vast consistorial hall.

  “The Holy Father will receive them here,” the high-ranking lackey softly informed the sedarius who carried the credentials. He glanced over the pilgrims, rather disapprovingly, Francis thought. He whispered briefly to the sedarius. The sedarius reddened and whispered to the clan chief. The clan chief glowered and removed his fanged and snarling headdress, letting the panther head dangle over his shoulder. There was a brief conference about positions, while His Supre
me Unctuousness, the leading lackey, in tones so soft as to seem reproving, stationed his visiting chess pieces about the room in accordance with some arcane protocol which only the sedarii seemed to understand.

  The Pope was not long in arriving. the little man in the white cassock, surrounded by his retinue, strode briskly into the audience room. Brother Francis experienced a sudden dizzy spell. He remembered that Dom Arkos had threatened to flay him alive if he fainted during the audience, and he steeled himself against it.

  The line of pilgrims knelt. The old man in white gently bade them arise. Brother Francis finally found the courage to focus his eyes. In the basilica, the Pope had been only a radiant spot of white in a sea of color. Gradually, here in the audience room, Brother Francis perceived at closer range that the Pope was not, like the fabled nomads, nine feet tall. To the monk’s surprise, the frail old man, Father of Princes and Kings, Bridge-Builder of the World, and Vicar on Earth of Christ, appeared much less ferocious than Dom Arkos, Abbas.

  The Pope moved slowly along the line of pilgrims greeting each, embracing one of the bishops, conversing with each in his own dialect or through an interpreter, laughing at the expression of the monsignor to whom he transferred the task of carrying the falconer’s bird, and addressing the clan leader of the forest people with a peculiar hand gesture and a grunted word of forest dialect which caused that panther-clad chieftain to glow with a sudden grin of delight. The Pope noticed the dangling panther headgear and paused to replace it on the tribesman’s head. The latter’s chest bulged with pride; he glared about the room, apparently to catch the eye of His Supreme Unctuousness, the leading lackey, but that official seemed to have vanished into the woodwork.

  The Pope drew nearer to Brother Francis.

  Ecce Petrus Pontifex…. Behold Peter, the high priest. Leo XXI, himself: “Whom alone, God did appoint Prince over all countries and kingdoms, to root up, pull down, waste, destroy, plant, and build, that he might preserve a faithful people—” And yet in the face of Leo, the monk saw a kindly meekness which hinted that he was worthy of that title, loftier than any bestowed upon princes and kings, whereby he was called “the slave of the slaves of God.”