A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Jr. Miller

  “... et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.”

  “Sedete,” called the reader, and the ranks began seating themselves.

  The abbot glanced sharply at the figure on his left.

  “Poet!”

  The bruised lily bowed extravagantly and smiled. “Good evening, Sires, learned Thon, distinguished hosts,” he orated.

  “What are we having tonight? Roast fish and honeycombs in honor of the temporal resurrection that’s upon us? Or have you, m’Lord Abbot, finally cooked the goose of the mayor of the village?”

  “I would like to cook–”

  “Ha!” quoth the Poet, and turned affably toward the scholar. “Such culinary excellence one enjoys in this place, Thon Taddeo! You should join us more often. I suppose they are feeding you nothing but roast pheasant and unimaginative beef in the guesthouse. A shame! Here one fares better. I do hope Brother Chef has his usual gusto tonight, his inward flame, his enchanted touch. Ah ...” The Poet rubbed his hands and smirked hungrily. “Perhaps we shall have his inspired Mock Pork with Maize a la Friar John, eh?”

  “It sounds interesting,” said the scholar. “What is it?”

  “Greasy armadillo with parched corn, boiled in donkey milk. A regular Sunday special.”

  “Poet!” snapped the abbot; then to the thon: “I apologize for his presence. He wasn’t invited.”

  The scholar surveyed the Poet with detached amusement.

  “M’Lord Hannegan too, keeps several court fools,” he told Paulo. “I’m familiar with the species. You needn’t apologize for him.”

  The Poet sprang up from his stool and bowed deeply before the thon. “Allow me instead to apologize for the abbot, Sire!” he cried with feeling.

  He held the bow for a moment. They waited for him to finish his foolishness. Instead, he shrugged suddenly, sat down, and speared a smoking fowl from the platter deposited before them by a postulant. He tore off a leg and bit into it with gusto. They watched him with puzzlement.

  “I suppose you’re right in not accepting my apology for him,” he said to the thon at last.

  The scholar reddened slightly.

  “Before I throw you out, worm,” said Gault, “let’s probe the depths of this iniquity.”

  The Poet waggled his head and munched thoughtfully.

  “It’s pretty deep, all right,” he admitted.

  Someday Gault is going to strangle himself on that foot of his, thought Dom Paulo.

  But the younger priest was visibly annoyed, and sought to draw the incident out ad absurdum in order to find grounds for quashing the fool. “Apologize at length for your host, Poet,” he commanded. “And explain yourself as you go.”

  “Drop it, Father, drop it,” Paulo said hastily.

  The Poet smiled graciously at the abbot. “That’s all right, m’Lord,” he said. “I don’t mind apologizing for you in the least. You apologize for me, I apologize for you, and isn’t that a fitting maneuver in charity and good will? Nobody need apologize for himself–which is always so humiliating. Using my system, however, everyone gets apologized for, and nobody has to do his own apologizing.”

  Only the officers seemed to find the Poet’s remarks amusing. Apparently the expectation of humor was enough to produce the illusion of humor, and the comedian could elicit laughter with gesture and expression, regardless of what he said. Thon Taddeo wore a dry smirk, but it was the kind of look a man might give a clumsy performance by a trained animal.

  “And so,” the Poet was continuing, “if you would but allow me to serve as your humble helper, m’Lord, you would never have to eat your own crow. As your Apologetic Advocate, for example, I might be delegated by you to offer contrition to important guests for the existence of bedbugs. And to bedbugs for the abrupt change of fare.”

  The abbot glowered and resisted an impulse to grind the Poet’s bare toe with the heel of his sandal. He kicked the fellow’s ankle, but the fool persisted.

  “I would assume all the blame for you, of course,” he said, noisily chewing white meat. “It’s a fine system, one which I was prepared to make available to you too, Most Eminent Scholar. I’m sure you would have found it convenient. I have been given to understand that systems of logic and methodology must be devised and perfected before science advances. And my system of negotiable and transferable apologetics would have been of particular value to you, Thon Taddeo.”

  “Would have?”

  “Yes. It’s a pity. Somebody stole my blue-headed goat.”

  “Blue-headed goat?”

  “He had a head as bald as Hannegan’s, Your Brilliance, and blue as the tip of Brother Armbruster’s nose. I meant to make you a present of the animal but some dastard filched him before you came”

  The abbot clenched his teeth and held his heel poised over the Poet’s toe. Thon Taddeo was frowning slightly, but he seemed determined to untangle the Poet’s obscure skein of meaning.

  “Do we need a blue-headed goat?” he asked his clerk.

  “I can see no pressing urgency about it, sir,” said the clerk.

  “But the need is obvious!” said the Poet. “They say you are writing equations that will one day remake the world. They say a new light is dawning. If there’s to be light, then somebody will have to be blamed for the darkness that’s past.”

  “Ah, thence the goat.” Thon Taddeo glanced at the abbot. “A sickly jest. Is it the best he can do?”

  “You’ll notice he’s unemployed. But let us talk of something sensib–”

  “No, no, no, no!” objected the poet. “You mistake my meaning, Your Brilliance. The goat is to be enshrined and honored, not blamed! Crown him with the crown Saint Leibowitz sent you, and thank him for the light that’s rising. Then blame Leibowitz, and drive him into the desert. That way you won’t have to wear the second crown. The one with thorns. Responsibility, it’s called.”

  The Poet’s hostility had broken out into the open, and he was no longer trying to seem humorous. The thon gazed at him icily. The abbot’s heel wavered again over the Poet’s toe, and again had reluctant mercy on it.

  “And when,” said the Poet, “your patron’s army comes to seize this abbey, the goat can be placed in the courtyard and taught to bleat “There’s been nobody here but me, nobody here but me” whenever a stranger comes by.”

  One of the officers started up from his stool with an angry grunt, his hand reaching reflexively for his saber. He broke the hilt clear of the scabbard, and six inches of steel glistened a warning at the Poet. The thon seized his wrist and tried to force the blade back in the sheath, but it was like tugging at the arm of a marble statue.

  “Ah! A swordsman as well as a draftsman!” taunted the Poet, apparently unafraid of dying. “Your sketches of the abbey’s defenses show such promise of artistic–”

  The officer barked an oath and the blade leaped clean of the scabbard. His comrades seized him, however, before he could lunge. An astonished rumble came from the congregation as the startled monks came to their feet. The Poet was still smiling blandly.

  “–artistic growth,” he continued. “I predict that one day your drawing of the underwall tunnels will be hung in a museum of fine–”

  A dull chunk! came from under the table. The Poet paused in mid-bite, lowered the wishbone from his mouth, and turned slowly white. He munched, swallowed, and continued to lose color. He gazed abstractly upward.

  “You’re grinding it off,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth.

  “Through talking?” the abbot asked, and continued to grind.

  “I think I have a bone in my throat,” the Poet admitted.

  “You wish to be excused?”

  “I am afraid I must.”

  “A pity. We shall miss you.” Paulo gave the toe one last grind for good measure. “You may go then.”

  The Poet exhaled gustily, blotted his mouth, and arose. He drained his wine cup and inverted it in the center of the tray. Something in his manner compelled them to watch him. He pulled down his eyelid wit
h one thumb, bent his head over his cupped palm and pressed. The eyeball popped out into his palm, bringing a choking sound from the Texarkanans who were apparently unaware of the Poet’s artificial orb.

  “Watch him carefully,” said the Poet to the glass eye, and then deposited it on the upturned base of his wine cup where it stared balefully at Thon Taddeo. “Good evening, m’Lords,” he said cheerfully to the group, and marched away.

  The angry officer muttered a curse and struggled to free himself from the grasp of his comrades.

  “Take him back to his quarters and sit on him till he cools off,” the thon told them. “And better see that he doesn’t get a chance at that lunatic.”

  “I’m mortified,” he said to the abbot, when the livid guardsman was hauled away. “They aren’t my servants, and I can’t give them orders. But I can promise you he will grovel for this. And if he refuses to apologize and leave immediately, he’ll have to match that hasty sword against mine before noon tomorrow.”

  “No bloodshed!” begged the priest. “It was nothing. Let’s all forget it.” His hands were trembling, his countenance gray.

  “He will make apology and go,” Thon Taddeo insisted, “or I shall offer to kill him. Don’t worry, he doesn’t dare fight me because if he won, Hannegan would have him impaled on the public stake while they forced his wife to–but never mind that. He’ll grovel and go. Just the same, I’m deeply ashamed that such a thing could have come about.”

  “I should have had the Poet thrown out as soon as he showed up. He provoked the whole thing, and I failed to stop it. The provocation was clear.”

  “Provocation? By the fanciful lie of a vagrant fool? Josard reacted as if the Poet’s charges were true.”

  “Then you don’t know that they are preparing a comprehensive report on the military value of our abbey as a fortress?”

  The scholar’s jaw fell. He stared from one priest to the other in apparent unbelief.

  “Can this be true?” he asked after a long silence.

  The abbot nodded.

  “And you’ve permitted us to stay.”

  “We keep no secrets. Your companions are welcome to make such a study if they wish. I would not presume to ask why they want the information. The Poet’s assumption, of course, was merest fantasy.”

  “Of course,” the thon said weakly, not looking at his host.

  “Surely your prince has no aggressive ambitions in this region, as the Poet hinted.”

  “Surely not.”

  “And even if he did, I’m sure he would have the wisdom at least the wise counselors to lead him–to understand that our abbey’s value as a storehouse of ancient wisdom is many times greater than its value as a citadel.”

  The thon caught the note of pleading, the undercurrent of supplication for help, in the priest’s voice, and he seemed to brood on it, picking lightly at his food and saying nothing for a time.

  “We’ll speak of this matter again before I return to the collegium,” he promised quietly.

  A pall had fallen on the banquet, but it began to lift during the group singing in the courtyard after the meal, and it vanished entirely when the time came for the scholar’s lecture in the Great Hall. Embarrassment seemed at an end, and the group had resumed a surface cordiality.

  Dom Paulo led the thon to the lectern; Gault and the don’s clerk followed, joining them on the platform. Applause rang out heartily following the abbot’s introduction of the thon; the hush that followed suggested the silence of a courtroom awaiting a verdict. The scholar was no gifted orator, but the verdict proved satisfying to the monastic throng.

  “I have been amazed at what we’ve found here,” he told them. “A few weeks ago I would not have believed, did not believe, that records such as you have in your Memorabilia could still be surviving from the fall of the last mighty civilization. It is still hard to believe, but evidence forces us to adopt the hypothesis that the documents are authentic. Their survival here is incredible enough; but even more fantastic, to me, is the fact that they have gone unnoticed during this century, until now. Lately there have been men capable of appreciating their potential value–and not only myself. What Thon Kaschler might have done with them while he was alive!–even seventy years ago.”

  The sea of monks’ faces was alight with smiles upon hearing so favorable a reaction to the Memorabilia from one so gifted as the thon. Paulo wondered why they failed to sense the faint undercurrent of resentment–or was it suspicion?–in the speaker’s tone. “Had I known of these sources ten years ago,” he was saying, “much of my work in optics would have been unnecessary.” Ahha! thought the abbot, so that’s it. Or at least part of it. He’s finding out that some of his discoveries are only rediscoveries, and it leaves a bitter taste. But surely he must know that never during his lifetime can he be more than a recoverer of lost works; however brilliant, he can only do what others before him had done. And so it would be, inevitably, until the world became as highly developed as it had been before the Flame Deluge.

  Nevertheless, it was apparent that Thon Taddeo was impressed.

  “My time here is limited.” he went on, “From what I have seen, I suspect that it will take twenty specialists several decades to finish milking the Memorabilia for understandable information. Physical science normally proceeds by inductive reasoning tested by experiment; but here the task is deductive. From a few broken bits of general principles, we must attempt to grasp particulars. In some cases, it may prove impossible. For example–” He paused for a moment to produce a packet of notes and thumbed through them briefly. “Here is a quotation which I found buried downstairs. It’s from a four-page fragment of a book which may have been an advanced physics text. A few of you may have seen it.”

  “ ‘–and if the space terms predominate in the expression for the interval between event-points, the interval is said to be space-like, since it is then possible to select a co-ordinate system–belonging to an observer with an admissible velocity–in which the events appear simultaneous, and therefore separated only spatially. If, however, the interval is timelike the events cannot be simultaneous in any co-ordinate system, but there exists a co-ordinate system in which the space terms will vanish entirely, so that the separation between events will be purely temporal, id est, occurring at the same place, but at different times. Now upon examining the extremals of the real interval–” “

  He looked up with a whimsical smile. “Has anyone here looked at that reference lately?”

  The sea of faces remained blank.

  “Anyone ever remember seeing it?”

  Kornhoer and two others cautiously lifted their hands.

  “Anyone know what it means?”

  The hands quickly went down.

  The thon chuckled. “It’s followed by a page and a half of mathematics which I won’t try to read, but it treats some of our fundamental concepts as if they weren’t basic at all, but evanescent appearances that change according to one’s point of view. It ends with the word ‘therefore’ but the rest of the page is burned, and the conclusion with it. The reasoning is impeccable, however, and the mathematics quite elegant, so that I can write the conclusion myself. It seems the conclusion of a madman. It began with assumptions, however, which appeared equally mad. Is it a hoax? If it isn’t, what is its place in the whole scheme of the science of the ancients? What precedes it as prerequisite to understanding? What follows, and how can it be tested? Questions I can’t answer. This is only one example of the many enigmas posed by these papers you’ve kept so long. Reasoning which touches experiential reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients? Certain references tend to indicate it. One paper refers to elemental transmutation–which we just recently established as theoretically impossible–and then it says ‘experiment proves.’ But how?

  “It may take generations
to evaluate and understand some of these things. It is unfortunate that they must remain here in this inaccessible place, for it will take a concentrated effort by numerous scholars to make meaning of them. I am sure you realize that your present facilities are inadequate–not to mention ‘inaccessible’ to the rest of the world.”

  Seated on the platform behind the speaker, the abbot began to glower, waiting for the worst. Thon Taddeo chose, however, to offer no proposals. But his remarks continued to make clear his feeling that such relics belonged in more competent hands than those of the monks of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz, and that the situation as it prevailed was absurd. Perhaps sensing the growing uneasiness in the room, he soon turned to the subject of his immediate studies, which involved a more thorough investigation into the nature of light than had been made previously. Several of the abbey’s treasures were proving to be of much help, and he hoped to devise soon an experimental means for testing his theories. After some discussion of the phenomenon of refraction, he paused, then said apologetically: “I hope none of this offends anybody’s religious beliefs,” and looked around quizzically. Seeing that their faces remained curious and bland, he continued for a time, then invited questions from the congregation.

  “Do you mind a question from the platform?” asked the abbot.

  “Not at all,” said the scholar, looking a bit doubtful, as if thinking et tu, Brute.

  “I was wondering what there is about the refrangible property of light that you thought might be offensive to religion?”

  “Well–” The then paused uncomfortably. “Monsignor Apollo, whom you know, grew quite heated on the subject. He said that light could not possibly have been refrangible before the Flood, because the rainbow was supposedly–”

  The room burst into roaring laughter, drowning the rest of the remark. By the time the abbot had waved them to silence, Thon Taddeo was beet red, and Dom Paulo had some difficulty in maintaining his own solemn visage.

  “Monsignor Apollo is a good man, a good priest, but all men are apt to be incredible asses at times, especially outside their domains. I’m sorry I asked the question.”