A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Jr. Miller

  Inside the building, he groped for the right door, found it, and knocked. There was no immediate answer, but only a faint bleating sound which might or might not have issued from within the suite. He knocked again, then tried the door. It opened.

  Faint red light from a charcoal burner softened the darkness; the room reeked of stale food.

  “Poet?”

  Again the faint bleating, but closer now. He went to the burner, raked up an incandescent coal, and lit a splinter of kindling. He glanced around and shuddered at the litter of the room. It was empty. He transferred the flame to an oil lamp and went to explore the rest of the suite. It would have to be thoroughly scrubbed and fumigated (also, perhaps, exorcised) before Thon Taddeo moved in. He hoped to make the Poet-sirrah! do the scrubbing, but knew the chance was remote.

  In the second room, Dom Paulo suddenly felt as if someone were watching him. He paused and looked slowly around.

  A single eyeball peered at him from a vase of water on the shelf. The abbot nodded at it familiarly and went on.

  In the third room, he met the goat. It was their first meeting.

  The goat was standing atop a tall cabinet, munching turnip greens. It looked like a small breed of mountain goat, but it had a bald head that appeared bright blue by lamplight. Undoubtedly a freak by birth.

  “Poet?” he inquired, softly, looking straight at the goat and touching his pectoral cross.

  “In here,” came a sleepy voice from the fourth room.

  Dom Paulo sighed with relief. The goat went on munching greens. Now that had been a hideous thought, indeed.

  The Poet lay sprawled across the bed with a bottle of wine within easy reach; he blinked irritably at the light with his one good eye. “I was asleep,” he complained, adjusting his black eyepatch and reaching for the bottle.

  “Then wake up. You’re moving out of here immediately. Tonight. Dump your possessions in the hall to let the suite air out. Sleep in the stable boy’s cell downstairs if you must. Then come back in the morning and scrub this place out.”

  The Poet looked like a bruised lily for a moment, then made a grab for something under the blankets. He brought out a fist and stared at it thoughtfully. “Who used these quarters last?” he asked.

  “Monsignor Longi. Why?”

  “I wondered who brought the bedbugs.” The Poet opened his fist, pinched something out of his palm, cracked it between his nails, and flipped it away. “Thon Taddeo can have them. I don’t want them. I’ve been eaten up alive ever since I moved in. I was planning on leaving, but now that you’ve offered me my old cell back, I’ll be happy–”

  “I didn’t mean–”

  “–to accept your kind hospitality a little longer. Only until my book is finished, of course.”

  “What book? But never mind. Just get your things out of here.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Good. I don’t think I could stand these bugs another night.” The Poet rolled out of bed, but paused for a drink.

  “Give me the wine,” the abbot ordered.

  “Sure. Have some. It’s a pleasant vintage.”

  “Thank you, since you stole it from our cellars. It happens to be sacramental wine. Did that occur to you?”

  “It hasn’t been consecrated.”

  “I’m surprised you thought of that.” Dom Paulo took the bottle.

  “I didn’t steal it anyway. I–”

  “Never mind the wine. Where did you steal the goat?”

  “I didn’t steal it,” the Poet complained.

  “It just–materialized?”

  “It was a gift, Reverendissime.”

  “From whom?”

  “A dear friend, Domnissime.”

  “Whose dear friend?”

  “Mine, Sire.”

  “Now there’s a paradox. Where, now, did you–”

  “Benjamin, Sire.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed Dom Paulo’s face. “You stole it from old Benjamin?”

  The Poet winced at the word. “Please, not stole.”

  “Then what?”

  “Benjamin insisted that I take it as a gift after I had composed a sonnet in his honor.”

  “The truth!”

  The Poet-sirrah! swallowed sheepishly. “I won it from him at mumbly-peg.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s true! The old wretch nearly cleaned me out, and then refused to allow me credit. I had to stake my glass eye against the goat. But I won everything back.”

  “Get the goat out of the abbey.”

  “But it’s a marvelous species of goat. The milk is of an unearthly odor and contains essences. In fact it’s responsible for the Old Jew’s longevity.”

  “How much of it?”

  “All fifty-four hundred and eight years of it.”

  “I thought he was only thirty-two hundred and–” Dom Paulo broke off disdainfully. “What were you doing up on Last Resort?”

  “Playing mumbly-peg with old Benjamin.”

  “I mean–” The abbot steeled himself. “Never mind. Just get yourself moved out. And tomorrow get the goat back to Benjamin.”

  “But I won it fairly.”

  “We’ll not discuss it. Take the goat to the stable, then. I’ll have it returned to him myself.”

  “Why?”

  “We have no use for a goat. Neither have you.”

  “Ho, ho,” the Poet said archly.

  “What did that mean, pray?”

  “Thon Taddeo is coming. There’ll be need of a goat before it’s finished. You can be sure of that.” He chuckled smugly to himself.

  The abbot turned away in irritation. “Just get out,” he added superfluously, and then went to wrestle with contention in the basement, where the Memorabilia now reposed.

  14

  The vaulted basement had been dug during the centuries of nomadic infiltration from the north, when the Bayring Horde had overrun most of the Plains and desert, looting and vandalizing all villages that lay in their path. The Memorabilia, the abbey’s small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soi-disant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey’s books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knights-friars would have burned many of them as “heretical” according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope.

  Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible–that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

  The Memorabilia was full of ancient words, ancient formulae, ancient reflections of meaning, detached from minds that had died long ago, when a different sort of society had passed into oblivion. There was little of it that could still be understood. Certain papers seemed as meaningless as a Breviary would seem to a shaman of the nomad tribes. Others retained a certain ornamental
beauty or an orderliness that hinted of meaning, as a rosary might suggest a necklace to a nomad. The earliest brothers of the Leibowitzian Order had tried to press a sort of Veronica’s Veil to the face of a crucified civilization; it had come away marked with an image of the face of ancient grandeur, but the image was faintly printed, incomplete, and hard to understand. The monks had preserved the image, and now it still survived for the world to inspect and try to interpret if the world wanted to do so. The Memorabilia could not, of itself, generate a revival of ancient science or high civilization, however, for cultures were begotten by the tribes of Man, not by musty tomes; but the books could help, Dom Paulo hoped–the books could point out directions and offer hints to a newly evolving science. It had happened once before, so the Venerable Boedullus had asserted in his De Vestigiis Antecesserum Civitatum.

  And this time, thought Dom Paulo, we’ll keep them reminded of who kept the spark burning while the world slept. He paused to look back; for a moment he had imagined that he had heard a frightened bleat from the Poet’s goat.

  The clamor from the basement soon blanketed his hearing as he descended the underground stairs toward the source of the turmoil. Someone was hammering steel pins into stone. Sweat mingled with the odor of old books. A feverish bustle of unscholarly activity filled the library. Novices hurried past with tools. Novices stood in groups and studied floor plans. Novices shifted desks and tables and heaved a makeshift machinery, rocking it into place. Confusion by lamplight. Brother Armbruster, the librarian and Rector of the Memorabilia, stood watching it from a remote alcove in the shelves, his arms tightly folded and his face grim. Dom Paulo avoided his accusing gaze.

  Brother Kornhoer approached his ruler with a lingering grin of enthusiasms. “Well, Father Abbot, we’ll soon have a light such as no man alive has ever seen.”

  “This is not without a certain vanity, Farther,” Paulo replied.

  “Vanity, Domne? To put to good use what we’ve learned?”

  “I had in mind our haste to put it to use in time to impress a certain visiting scholar. But never mind. Let’s see this engineer’s wizardry.”

  They walked toward the makeshift machine. It reminded the abbot of nothing useful, unless one considered engines for torturing prisoners useful. An axle, serving as the shaft, was connected by pulleys and belts to a waist-high turnstile. Four wagon wheels were mounted on the axle a few inches apart. Their thick iron tires were scored with grooves, and the grooves supported countless birds’-nests of copper wire, drawn from coinage at the local smithy in Sanly Bowitts. The wheels were apparently free to spin in mid-air, Dom Paulo noticed, for their tires touched no surface. However, stationary blocks of iron faced the tires, like brakes, with out quite touching them. The blocks too had been wound with innumerable turns of wire–”field coils” as Kornhoer called them. Dom Paulo solemnly shook his head.

  “It’ll be the greatest physical improvement at the abbey since we got the printing press a hundred years ago,” Kornhoer ventured proudly.

  “Will it work?” Dom Paulo wondered.

  “I’ll stake a month’s extra chores on it, m’Lord.”

  You’re staking more than that, thought the priest, but suppressed utterance. “Where does the light come out?” he asked, peering at the odd contraption again.

  The monk laughed. “Oh, we have a special lamp for that. What you see here is only the ‘dynamo.’ It produces the electrical essence which the lamp will burn.”

  Ruefully, Dom Paulo contemplated the amount of space the dynamo was occupying. “This essence,” he murmured, “–can’t it be extracted from mutton fat, perhaps?”

  “No, no–The electrical essence is, well–Do you want me to explain?”

  “Better not. Natural science is not my bent. I’ll leave it to you younger heads.” He stepped back quickly to avoid being brained by a timber carried past by a pair of hurrying carpenters. “Tell me,” he said, “if by studying writings from the Leibowitzian age you can learn how to construct this thing, why do you suppose none of our predecessors saw fit to construct it?”

  The monk was silent for a moment. “It’s not easy to explain,” he said at last. “Actually, in the writings that survive, there’s no direct information about the construction of a dynamo. Rather, you might say that the information is implicit in a whole collections of fragmentary writings. Partially implicit. And it has to be got out by deduction. But to get it, you also need some theories to work from–theoretical information our predecessors didn’t have.”

  “But we do?”

  “Well, yes–now that there have been a few men like–” his tone became deeply respectful and he paused before pronouncing the name “–like Thon Taddeo–”

  “Was that a complete sentence?” the abbot asked rather sourly.

  “Well, until recently, few philosophers have concerned themselves with new theories in physics. Actually, it was the work of, of Thon Taddeo–” the respectful tone again, Dom Paulo noted, “–that gave us the necessary working axioms. His work of the Mobility of Electrical Essences, for example, and his Conservation Theorem–”

  “He should be pleased, then, to see his work applied. But where is the lamp itself, may I ask? I hope it’s no larger than the dynamo.”

  “This is it, Domne,” said the monk, picking up a small object from the table. It seemed to be only a bracket for holding a pair of black rods and a thumbscrew for adjusting their spacing. “These are carbons,” Kornhoer explained.

  “The ancients would have called it an ‘arc lamp.’ There was another kind, but we don’t have the materials to make it.”

  “Amazing. Where does the light come from?”

  “Here.” The monk pointed to the gap between the carbons. “It must be a very tiny flame,” said the abbot.

  “Oh, but bright! Brighter, I expect, than a hundred candles.”

  “No!”

  “You find that impressive?”

  “I find it preposterous–” noticing Brother Kornhoer’s sudden hurt expression, the abbot hastily added: “–to think how we’ve been limping along on beeswax and mutton fat.”

  “I have been wondering,” the monk shyly confided, “if the ancients used them on their altars instead of candles.”

  “No,” said the abbot. “Definitely, no. I can tell you that. Please dismiss that idea as quickly as possible, and don’t even think of it again.”

  “Yes, Father Abbot.”

  “Now, where are you going to hang that thing?”

  “Well–” Brother Kornhoer paused to stare speculatively around the gloomy basement. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I suppose it should go over the desk where, Thon Taddeo–” (Why does he pause like that whenever he says it, Dom Paulo wondered irritably.) “–will be working.”

  “We’d better ask Brother Armbruster about that,” the abbot decided, and then noticing the monk’s sudden discomfort: “What’s the matter? Have you and Brother Armbruster been–”

  Kornhoer’s face twisted apologetically. “Really, Father Abbot, I haven’t lost my temper with him even once. Oh, we’ve had words, but–” He shrugged. “He doesn’t want anything moved. He keeps mumbling about witchcraft and the like. It’s not easy to reason with him. His eyes are half-blind now from reading by dim light–and yet he says it’s Devil’s work we’re up to. I don’t know what to say.”

  Dom Paulo frowned slightly as they crossed the room toward the alcove where Brother Armbruster still stood glowering upon the proceedings.

  “Well, you’ve got your way now,” the librarian said to Kornhoer as they approached. “When’ll you be putting in a mechanical librarian, Brother?”

  “We find hints, Brother, that once there were such things,” the inventor growled. “In descriptions of the Machina analytica, you’ll find references to–”

  “Enough, enough,” the abbot interposed; then to the librarian: “Thon Taddeo will need a place to work. What do you suggest?”

  Armbruster jerked one thumb toward the Natu
ral Science alcove. “Let him read at the lectern in there like anyone else.”

  “What about setting up a study for him here on the open floor, Father Abbot?” Kornhoer suggested in hasty counter-proposal.

  “Besides a desk, he’ll need an abacus, a wall slate, and a drawing board. We could partition it off with temporary screens.”

  “I thought he was going to need our Leibowitzian references and earliest writings?” the librarian said suspiciously.

  “He will.”

  “Then he’ll have to walk back and forth a lot if you put him in the middle. The rare volumes are chained, and the chains won’t reach that far.”

  “That’s no problem,” said the inventor. “Take off the chains. They look silly anyway. The schismatic cults have all died out or become regional. Nobody’s heard of the Pancratzian Military Order in a hundred years.”

  Armbruster reddened angrily. “Oh no you don’t,” be snapped. “The chains stay on.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s not the book burners now. It’s the villagers we have to worry about. The chains stay on.”

  Kornhoer turned to the abbot and spread his bands. “See, m’Lord?,”

  “He’s right,” said Dom Paulo. “There’s too much agitation in the village. The town council expropriated our school, don’t forget. Now they’ve got a village library, and they want us to fill its shelves. Preferably with rare volumes, of course. Not only that, we had trouble with thieves last year. Brother Armbruster’s right. The rare volumes stay chained.”

  “All right,” Kornhoer sighed. “So he’ll have to work in the alcove.”

  “Now, where do we hang your wondrous lamp?”

  The monks glanced toward the cubicle. It was one of fourteen identical stalls, sectioned according to subject matter, which faced the central floor. Each alcove had its archway, and from an iron hook imbedded in the keystone of each arch hung a heavy crucifix.

  “Well, if he’s going to work in the alcove,” said Kornhoer, “we’ll just have to take the crucifix down and hang it there, temporarily. There’s no other–”

  “Heathen!” hissed the librarian. “Pagan! Desecrator!” Armbruster raised trembling hands heavenward. “God help me, lest I tear him apart with these hands! Where will he stop? Take him away, away!” He turned his back on them, his hands still trembling aloft.