A Canticle For Leibowitz l-1

by Walter M. Miller

  “We all regret the necessity,” he said at last, “of sometimes disturbing the quiet of contemplative life with news from the outside world. But we must remember too that we are here to pray for the world and its salvation, as for our own. Especially now, the world could use some praying for.” He paused to glance at Zerchi.

  The abbot nodded.

  “Lucifer is fallen,” said the priest, and stopped. He stood there looking down at the lectern as if suddenly struck dumb.

  Zerchi arose. “That is Brother Joshua’s inference, by the way,” he interposed. “The Regency Council of the Atlantic Confederacy has said nothing to speak of. The dynasty has issued no statements. We know little more than we knew yesterday, except that The World Court is meeting in emergency session, and that the Defense Interior people are moving fast. There is a defense alert, and we’ll be affected, but don’t be disturbed. Father — ?”

  “Thank you, Dome,” said the prior, seeming to regain his voice as Dom Zerchi was seated again. “Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements:

  “First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace.

  “Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one. If you’ve read it, read it again.

  “Third, in the event that an attack warning is sounded, the following brothers are to report immediately to Old Abbey courtyard for special instructions. If no attack warning comes, the same brothers will report there anyway day after tomorrow morning right after Matins and Lauds. Names — Brothers Joshua, Christopher, Augustin, James, Samuel—”

  The monks listened with quiet tension, betraying no emotion. There were twenty-seven names in all, but no novices were among them. Some were eminent scholars, there were a janitor and a cook as well. At first hearing, one might assume that the names had been drawn from a box. By the time Father Lehy had finished the list, some of the brothers were eying each other curiously.

  “And this same group will report to the dispensary for a complete physical examination tomorrow after Prime,” the prior finished. He turned to look questioningly at Dom Zerchi.

  “Domne?”

  “Yes, just one thing,” said the abbot, approaching the lectern. “Brothers, let us not assume that there is going to be war. Let’s remind ourselves that Lucifer has been with us — this time — for nearly two centuries. And was dropped only twice, in sizes smaller than megaton. We all know what could happen, if there’s war. The genetic festering is still with us from the last time Man tried to eradicate himself. Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz’ time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it — like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do, but who never pulled a trigger before. They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the still-born, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it.

  “Now — now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know — with dead certainty. They can know it by the children they beget and send to asylums for the deformed; They know it, and they’ve kept the peace. Not Christ’s peace, certainly, but peace, until lately — with only two warlike incidents in as many centuries. Now they have the bitter certainty. My sons, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—”

  He stopped speaking. Someone was smiling,. It was only a small smile, but in the midst of a sea of grave faces it stood out like a dead fly in a bowl of cream. Dom Zerchi frowned. The old man kept on smiling wryly. He sat at the “beggar’s table” with three other transient tramps — an old fellow with a brushy beard, stained yellow about the chin. As a jacket, he wore a burlap bag with armholes. He continued to smile at Zerchi. He looked old as a rain-worn crag, and a suitable candidate for a Maundy laving. Zerchi wondered if he were about to stand up and make an announcement to his hosts — or blow a ramshorn at them, perhaps? — but that was only an illusion generated by the smile. He quickly dismissed the feeling that he had seen the old man before, somewhere. He concluded his remarks.

  On his way back to his place, he paused. The beggar nodded pleasantly at his host. Zerchi came nearer.

  “Who are you, if I may ask. Have I seen you somewhere before?”

  “What?”

  “Latzar shemi,” the beggar repeated.

  “I don’t quite—”

  “Call me Lazarus, then,” said the old one, and chuckled.

  Dom Zerchi shook his head and moved on. Lazarus? There was, in the region, an old wives’ tale to the effect that — but what a shoddy sort of myth that was. Raised up by Christ but still not a Christian, they said. And yet he could not escape the feeling that he had seen the old man somewhere.

  “Let the bread be brought for blessing,” he called, and the deferment of supper was at an end.

  After the prayers, the abbot glanced toward the beggars’ table again. The old man was merely fanning his soup with a sort of basket hat. Zerchi dismissed it with a shrug, and the meal began in solemn silence.

  Compline, the Church’s night prayer, seemed especially profound that night.

  But Joshua slept badly afterwards. In a dream he met Mrs. Grales again. There was a surgeon who sharpened a knife, saying, “This deformity must be removed before it becomes malignant.” And the Rachel face opened its eyes and tried to speak to Joshua, but he could hear her only faintly, and understand her not at all.

  “Accurate am I the exception,” she seemed to be saying, “I commensurate the deception. Am.”

  He could make nothing of it, but he tried to reach through to save her. There seemed to be a rubbery wall of glass in the way. He paused and tried to read her lips. I am the, I am the —

  “I am the Immaculate Conception,” came the dream whisper.

  He tried to tear his way through the rubbery glass to save her from the knife, but it was too late, and there was a great deal of blood afterwards. He awoke from the blasphemous nightmare with a shudder and prayed for a time; but as soon as he slept, there was Mrs. Grales again.

  It was a troubled night, a night that belonged to Lucifer. It was the night of the Atlantic assault against the Asian space installations.

  In swift retaliation, an ancient city died.

  26

  “This is your Emergency Warning Network,” the announcer was saying when Joshua entered the abbot’s study after Matins of the following day, “bringing you the latest bulletin on the pattern of fallout from the enemy missile assault on Texarkana…”

  “You sent for me, Domne?”

  Zerchi waved him to silence and toward a seat. The priest’s face looked drawn and bloodless, a steel-gray mask of icy self-control. To Joshua, he seemed to have shrunk in size, to have aged since nightfall. They listened gloomily to the voice which waxed and waned at four-second intervals as the broadcasting stations were switched on and off the air as an impediment to enemy direction-finding equipment:

  “…but first, an announcement just released by the Supreme Command. The royal family is safe. I repeat: the royal family is known to be safe. The Regency Council is said to have been absent from the city when the enemy struck. Outside of the disaster area, no civil disorders have been reported, and none is expected.

  “A cease-fire order has been issued by the World Court of Nations, with a suspended proscription, involving the death sentence, against the responsible heads of government of both nations. Being suspended, the sentence becomes applicable only if the decree is disobeyed. Both governments cabled to the court their immediate acknowledgment of the order, and there is, therefore, a strong probability that the clash is at an end, a few hours after it began as a preventative assault against certain illegal space installations. In a surprise attack, the space forces of the Atla
ntic Confederacy last night struck at three concealed Asian missile sites located on the far side of the moon, and totally destroyed one enemy space station known to be involved in a guidance system for space-to-earth missiles. It was expected that the enemy would retaliate against our forces in space, but the barbarous assault on our capital city was an act of desperation which no one anticipated.

  “Special bulletin: Our government has just announced its intention to honor the cease-fire for ten days if the enemy agrees to an immediate meeting of foreign ministers and military commanders on Guam. The enemy is expected to accept.”

  “Ten days,” the abbot groaned. “It doesn’t give us enough time.”

  “The Asian radio, however, is still insisting that the recent thermonuclear disaster in Itu Wan, causing some eighty thousand casualties, was the work of an errant Atlantic missile, and the destruction of the city of Texarkana was therefore retaliation in kind…”

  The abbot snapped off the set. “Where’s the truth?” he asked quietly. “What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murders been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justification in our “police action” in space? How can we know? Certainly there was no justification for what they did — or was there? We only know what that thing says, and that thing is a captive. The Asian radio has to say what will least displease its government; ours has to say what will least displease our fine patriotic opinionated rabble, which is what, coincidentally, the government wants it to say anyhow, so where’s the difference? Dear God, there must be half a million dead, if they hit Texarkana with the real thing. I feel like saying words I’ve never even heard. Toad’s dung. Hag pus. Gangrene of the soul. Immortal brain-rot. Do you understand me, Brother? And Christ breathed the same carrion air with us; how meek the Majesty of our Almighty God! What an Infinite Sense of Humor — for Him to become one of us! — King of the Universe, nailed on a cross as a Yiddish Schlemiel by the likes of us. They say Lucifer was cast down for refusing to adore the Incarnate Word; the Foul One must totally lack a sense of humor! God of Jacob, God even of Cain! Why do they do it all again?

  “Forgive me, I’m raving,” he added, less to Joshua than to the old woodcarving of Saint Leibowitz that stood in one corner of the study. He had paused in his pacing to glance up at the face of the image. The image was old, very old. Some earlier ruler of the abbey had sent it down to a basement storeroom to stand in dust and gloom while a dry-rot etched the wood, eating away the spring grain and leaving the summer grain so that the face seemed deeply lined. The saint wore a slightly satiric smile. Zerchi had rescued it from oblivion because of the smile.

  “Did you see that old beggar in the refectory last night?” he asked irrelevantly, still peering curiously at the statue’s smile.

  “I didn’t notice, Domne. Why?”

  “Never mind, I guess I’m just imagining it.” He fingered the mound of faggots where the wooden martyr stood. That’s where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam’s, Herod’s, Judas’s, Hannegan’s, mine. Everybody’s. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by wrath of Heaven: Why? We shouted it loudly enough — God’s to be obeyed by nations as by men. Caesar’s to be God’s policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, nor His heir. To all ages, all peoples—”Whoever exalts a race or a State of a particular form of State or the depositories of power… whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God…” Where had that come from? Eleventh Pius, he thought, without certainty — eighteen centuries ago. But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn’t he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people — same rabble that shouted: “Non habemus regem nisi caesarem,” when confronted by Him — God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon. Same rabble that martyred Leibowitz…

  “Caesar’s divinity is showing again.”

  “Domne?”

  “Let it pass. Are the brothers in the courtyard yet?”

  “About half of them were when I passed. Shall I go see?”

  “Do. Then come back here. I have something to say to you before we join them.”

  Before Joshua returned, the abbot had got the Quo peregrinatur papers out of the wall safe.

  “Read the precis,” he told the monk. “Look at the table of organization, read the procedural outline. You’ll have to study the rest in detail, but later.”

  The communicator buzzed loudly while Joshua was reading.

  “Reverend Father Jethrah Zerchi, Abbas, please,” droned the voice of a robot operator.

  “Speaking.”

  “Urgent priority wire from Sir Eric Cardinal Hoffstraff, New Rome. There is no courier service at this hour. Shall I read?”

  “Yes, read the text of it. I’ll send someone down later to pick up a copy.”

  “The text is as follows: ‘Grex peregrinus erit.Quam primum est factum suscipiendum vobis, jussu Sactae Sedis. Suscipite ergo operis partem ordini vestro propriam…’“

  “Can you read that back in Southwest translation?” the abbot asked.

  The operator complied, but in neither did the message seem to contain anything unexpected. It was a confirmation of the plan and a request for speed.

  “Receipt acknowledged,” he said at last.

  “Will there be a reply?”

  “Reply as follows: Eminentissimo Domino Eric Cardinali Hoffstraff obsequitur Jethra Zerchius, A.O.L., Abbas. Ad has res disputandas iam coegi discessuros fratres ut hodie parati dimitti Roman prima aerisnave possint. End of text.”

  “I read back: ‘Eminentissimo…’ “

  “All right, that’s all. Out.”

  Joshua had finished reading the precis. He closed the portfolio and looked up slowly.

  “Are you ready to get nailed on it?” Zerchi asked.

  “I — I’m not sure I understand.” The monk’s face was pale.

  “I asked you three questions yesterday. I need the answers now.”

  “I’m willing to go.”

  “That leaves two to be answered.”

  “I’m not sure about the priesthood, Domne.”

  “Look, you’ll have to decide. You have less experience with starships than any of the others. None of the others is ordained. Someone has to be partially released from technical duties for pastoral and administrative duties. I told you this will not mean abandoning the Order. It won’t, but your group will become an independent daughter house of the Order, under a modified rule. The Superior will be elected by secret ballet of the professed, of course — and you are the most obvious candidate, if you have a vocation to the priesthood as well. Have you, or haven’t you? There’s your inquisition, and the time’s now, and a brief now it is too.”

  “But Reverend Father, I’m not through studying—”

  “That doesn’t matter. Besides the twenty-seven-man crew — all our people — others are going too: six sisters and twenty children from the Saint Joseph school, a couple of scientists, and three bishops, two of them newly consecrated. They can ordain, and since one of the three is a delegate of the Holy Father, they will even have the power to consecrate bishops. They can ordain you when they feel you’re ready. You’ll be in space for years, you know. But we want to know whether you have a vocation, and we want to know it now.”

  Brother Joshua stammered for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like half an hour? Would you like a glass of water? You go so gray. I tell you, son, if you’re to lead the flock, you’ll have to be able to decide things here-and-now. You need to now. Well, can you speak?”

  “Domne, I’m not — certain—”

  “You can croak anyhow, eh? Are you going to submit to the
yoke, son? Or aren’t you broken yet? You’ll be asked to be the ass He rides into Jerusalem, but it’s a heavy load, and it’ll break your back, because He’s carrying the sins of the world.”

  “I don’t think I’m able.”

  “Croak and wheeze. But you can growl too, and that’s well for the leader of the pack. Listen, none of us has been really able. But we’ve tried, and we’ve been tried. It tries you to destruction, but you’re here for that. This Order has had abbots of gold, abbots of cold tough steel, abbots of corroded lead, and none of them was able, although some were abler than others, some saints even. The gold got battered, the steel got brittle and broke, and the corroded lead got stamped into ashes by Heaven. Me, I’ve been lucky enough to be quicksilver; I spatter, but I run back together somehow. I feel another spattering coming on, though, Brother, and I think it’s for keeps this time. What are you made of, son? What’s to be tried?”

  “Puppy dog tails. I’m meat, and I’m scared, Reverend Father.”

  “Steel screams when it’s forged, it gasps when it’s quenched. It creaks when it goes under load. I think even steel is scared, son. Take half an hour to think? A drink of water? A drink of wind? Totter off awhile. If it makes you seasick, then prudently vomit. If it makes you terrified, scream. If it makes you anything, pray. But come into the church before Mass, and tell us what a monk is made of. The Order is fissioning, and the part of us that goes into space goes forever. Are you called to be its shepherd, or are you not? Go and decide.”