A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Jr. Miller

  Then, after the generations of the darkness came the generations of the light. And they called it the Year of Our Lord 3781–a year of His peace, they prayed.

  Fiat Voluntas Tua

  24

  There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers.

  It was inevitable, it was manifest destiny, they felt (and not for the first time) that such a race go forth to conquer stars. To conquer them several times, if need be, and certainly to make speeches about the conquest. But, too, it was inevitable that the race succumb again to the old maladies on new worlds, even as on Earth before, in the litany of life and in the special liturgy of Man: Versicles by Adam., Rejoinders by the Crucified.

  We are the centuries.

  We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers,

  and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.

  We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.

  Hut two threep foa!

  Left!

  Left!

  He-had-a-good-wife-but-he

  Left!

  Left!

  Left!

  Right!

  Left!

  Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben faellt.

  We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.

  We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do–

  Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,

  telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve

  and a traveling salesman called Lucifer.

  We bury your dead and their reputations.

  We bury you. We are the centuries.

  Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:

  (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)

  Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens–and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH!–an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)

  Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:

  LUCIFER IS FALLEN; the code words, flashed electrically across the continent, were whispered in conference rooms, were circulated in the form of crisp memoranda stamped SUPREME SECRETISSIMO), were prudently withheld from the press. The words rose in a threatening tide behind a dike of official secrecy. There were several holes in the dike, but the holes were fearlessly plugged by bureaucratic Dutch boys whose forefingers became exceedingly swollen while they dodged verbal spitballs fired by the press.

  FIRST REPORTER: What is Your Lordship’s comment on Sir Rische Thon Berker’s statement that the radiation count on the Northwest Coast is ten times the normal level?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: I have not read the statement.

  FIRST REPORTER: Assuming it to be true, what could be responsible for such an increase?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: The question calls for conjecture. Perhaps Sir Rische discovered a rich uranium deposit. No, strike that out. I have no comment.

  SECOND REPORTER: Does Your Lordship regard Sir Rische as a competent and responsible scientist?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: He has never been employed by my department.

  SECOND REPORTER: That is not a responsive answer.

  DEFENSE MINISTER: It is quite responsive. Since he has never been employed by my department, I have no way of knowing his competence or responsibility. I am not a scientist.

  LADY REPORTER: Is it true that a nuclear explosion occurred recently somewhere across the Pacific?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: As Madam well knows, the testing of atomic weapons of any kind is a high crime and an act of war under present international law. We are not at war. Does that answer your question?

  LADY REPORTER: No, Your Lordship, it does not. I did not ask if a test had occurred. I asked whether an explosion had occurred.

  DEFENSE MINISTER: We set off no such explosion. If they set one off, does Madam suppose that this government would be informed of it by them?

  ( Polite laughter. )

  LADY REPORTER: That does not answer my–

  FIRST REPORTER: Your Lordship, Delegate Jerulian has charged the Asian Coalition with the assembly of hydrogen weapons in deep space, and he says our Executive Council knows it and does nothing about it. Is that true?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: I believe it is true that the Opposition’s Tribune made some such ridiculous charge, yes.

  FIRST REPORTER: Why is the charge ridiculous? Because they are not making space-to-earth missiles in space? Or because we are doing something about it?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: Ridiculous either way. I should like to point out, however, that the manufacture of nuclear weapons has been prohibited by treaty ever since they were redeveloped. Prohibited everywhere–in space or on Earth.

  SECOND REPORTER: But there’s no treaty to proscribe the orbiting of fissionable materials, is there?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: Of course not. The space-to-space vehicles are all nuclear powered. They have to be fueled.

  SECOND REPORTER: And there’s no treaty to prohibit orbiting of other materials from which nuclear weapons might be manufactured?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: (irritably): To my knowledge, the existence of matter outside our atmosphere has not been outlawed by any treaty or act of parliament. It is my understanding that space is chock-full of things like the moon and the asteroids, which are not made of green cheese.

  LADY REPORTER: Is Your Lordship suggesting that nuclear weapons could be manufactured without raw materials from Earth?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: I was not suggesting that, no. Of course it’s theoretically possible. I was saying that no treaty or law prohibits the orbiting of any special raw materials–only nuclear weapons.

  LADY REPORTER: If there was a recent test shot in the Orient, which do you think more probable: a subterranean explosion that broke surface, or a space-to-earth missile with a defective warhead?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: Madam, your question is so conjectural that you force me to say: “No comment.”

  LADY REPORTER: I was only echoing Sir Rische and Delegate Jerulian.

  DEFENSE MINISTER: They are free to indulge in wild speculation. I am not.

  SECOND REPORTER: At the risk of seeming wry–What is Your Lordship’s opinion of the weather?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: Rather warm in Texarkana, isn’t it? I understand they’re having some bad dust storms in the Southwest. We may catch some of it hereabouts.

  LADY REPORTER: Are you in favor of Motherhood, Lord Ragelle?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: I am sternly opposed to it, Madam. It exerts a malign influence on youth, particularly upon young recruits. The military services would have superior soldiers if our fighting men had not been corrupted by Motherhood.

  LADY REPORTER: May we quote you on that?

  DEFENSE MINISTER: Certainly, Madam–but only in my obituary, not sooner.

  LADY REPORTER: Thank you. I’ll prepare it in advance.

  Like other abbots
before him, the Dom Jethrah Zerchi was by nature not an especially contemplative man, although as spiritual ruler of his community he was vowed to foster the development of certain aspects of the contemplative life in this flock, and, as a monk, to attempt the cultivation of a contemplative disposition in himself. Dom Zerchi was not very good at either of these. His nature impelled him toward action even in thought; his mind refused to sit still and contemplate. There was a quality of restlessness about him which had driven him to the leadership of the flock; it made him a bolder ruler, occasionally even a more successful ruler, than some of his predecessors, but that same restlessness could easily become a liability, or even a vice.

  Zerchi was vaguely aware, most of the time, of his own inclination toward hasty or impulsive action when confronted by unslayable dragons. Just now, however, the awareness was not vague but acute. It operated in unfortunate retrospect. The dragon had already bitten St. George.

  The dragon was an Abominable Autoscribe, and its malignant enormity, electronic by disposition, filled several cubical units of hollow wall space and a third of the volume of the abbot’s desk. As usual, the contraption was on the blink. It miscapitalized, mispunctuated, and interchanged various words. Only a moment ago, it had committed electrical lese majeste on the person of the sovereign abbot, who, after calling a computer repairman and waiting three days for him to appear, had decided to repair the stenographic abomination himself. The floor of his study was littered with typed scraps of trial dictation. Typical among these was one which bore the information:

  tEsting tesTing testiNg? TESting tesTing? damNatioN? whY the craZY capiTALs# now Is the tiMe foR alL gooD memoriZERS to Gum to tHe aCHe of the bookLEGgerS? Drat; caN yOu do beTTer in LAtin# now traNsLaTe; nECCesse Est epistULam sacri coLLegio mIttendAm esse statim dictem?What’s wrong WITH tHe blasTED THing#

  Zerchi sat on the floor in the midst of the litter and tried to massage the involuntary tremor out of his forearm, which had been recently electrified while exploring the Autoscribe’s intestinal regions. The muscular twitching reminded him of the galvanic response of a severed frog’s leg. Since he had prudently remembered to disconnect the machine before tampering with it, he could only suppose that the fiend who invented the thing had provided it with facilities for electrocuting customers even without power. While tweaking and tugging at connections in a search for loose wires, he had been assaulted by a high voltage filter capacitor which had taken advantage of an opportunity to discharge itself to ground through the person of the Reverend Father Abbot when Reverend Father’s elbow brushed against the chassis. But Zerchi had no way of knowing whether he had fallen victim to a law of Nature for filter capacitors or to a cunningly devised booby trap aimed at discouraging customer-tampering. Anyway, he had fallen. His posture on the floor had come about involuntarily. His only claim to competence at the repair of polylinguistic transcription devices lay in his proud record of once having extracted a dead mouse from the information storage circuitry, thereby correcting a mysterious tendency on the part of the machine to write double syllables (doudoubleble sylsylabablesles). Having discovered no dead mice this time, he could feel for loose wires and hope Heaven had granted him charismata as an electronic healer. But it was apparently not so.

  “Brother Patrick!” he called toward the outer office, and climbed wearily to his feet.

  “Hey, Brother Pat!” he shouted again.

  Presently the door opened and his secretary waddled in, glanced at the open wall cabinets with their stupefying maze of computer circuitry, scanned the cluttered floor, then warily studied his spiritual ruler’s expression. “Shall I call the repair service again, Father Abbot?”

  “Why bother?” Zerchi grunted. “You’ve called them three times. They’ve made three promises. We’ve waited three days. I need a stenographer. Now! Preferably a Christian. That thing–” he waved irritably toward the Abominable Autoscribe–”is a damned infidel or worse. Get rid of it. I want it out of here.”

  “The APLAC?”

  “The APLAC. Sell it to an atheist. No, that wouldn’t be kind. Sell it as junk. I’m through with it. Why, for Heaven’s sake, did Abbot Boumous–may his soul be blessed–ever buy the silly contraption?”

  “Well, Domne, they say your predecessor was fond of gadgets, and it is convenient to be able to write letters in languages you yourself can’t speak.”

  “It is? You mean it would be. That contraption–listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn’t believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a ‘thinking machine’–man-made–be a rational soul? Bah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?”

  “Father?”

  “Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil, I tell you, and it chose the latter. Stop that snickering, will you? It’s not funny. The notion isn’t even pagan. Man made the contraption, but he didn’t make its principle. They speak of the vegetative principle as a soul, don’t they? A vegetable soul? And the animal soul? Then the rational human soul, and that’s all they list in the way of incarnate vivifying principles, angels being disembodied. But how do we know the list is comprehensive? Vegetative, animative, rational–and then what else? That’s what else, right there. That thing. And it fell. Get it out of here–But first I’ve got to get a radiogram off to Rome.”

  “Shall I get my pad, Reverend Father?”

  “Do you speak Alleghenian?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Neither do I, and Cardinal Hoffstraff doesn’t speak SouthWest.”

  “Why not Latin, then?”

  “Which Latin? The Vulgate or Modern? I don’t trust my own Anglo-Latin, and if I did, he’d probably not trust his.” He frowned at the bulk of the robotic stenographer. Brother Patrick frowned with him, then stepped over to the cabinets and began peering into the maze of subminiature circuit components.

  “No mouse,” the abbot assured him.

  “What are all these little knobs?”

  “Don’t touch!” Abbot Zerchi yelped as his secretary curiously fingered one of several dozen sub-chassis dial settings. These sub-chassis controls were mounted in neat square array in a box, the cover of which the abbot had removed, bore the irresistible warning: FACTORY ADJUSTMENTS ONLY.

  “You didn’t move it, did you?” he demanded, going to Patrick’s side.

  “I might have wiggled it a little, but I think it’s back where it was.”

  Zerchi showed him the warning on the box’s cover. “Oh,” said Pat, and both of them stared.

  “It’s the punctuation, mostly, isn’t it, Reverend Father?”

  “That and stray capitals, and a few confused words.”

  They contemplated the squiggles, quiggles, quids, thingumbobs, and doohickii in mystified silence.

  “Did you ever hear of the Venerable Francis of Utah?” the abbot asked at last.

  “I don’t recall the name, Domne. Why?”

  “I was just hoping he’s in a position to pray for us right now, although I don’t believe he was ever canonized. Here, let’s try turning this whatsis up a bit.”

  “Brother Joshua used to be some kind of an engineer. I forget what. But he was in space. They have to know a lot about computers.

  “I’ve already called him He’s afraid to touch it. Here, maybe it needs–”

  Patrick edged away. “If you would excuse me, m’Lord, I–”

  Zerchi glanced up at his wincing scribe. “Oh, ye of little faith!” he said, correcting another FACTORY ADJUSTMENT.

  “I thought I heard someone outside.”

  “Before the cock crows thrice–besides, you touched the first knob, didn’t you?”

  Patrick wilted. “But the cover was off, and ...”

  “Hinc igitur effuge. Out, out, before I decide it was your fault.”

  Alone again, Zerchi inserted the wall plug, sat at his desk, and, after muttering a brief prayer to Saint Leibowitz (who
in recent centuries had come into wider popularity as the patron saint of electricians than he had ever won as the founder of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz), flipped the switch. He listened for spitting and hissing noises, but none came. He heard only the faint clicking of delay relays and the familiar purr of timing motors as they came up to full speed. He sniffed. No smoke or ozone to be detected. Finally, he opened his eyes. Even the indicator lights of the desktop control panel were burning as usual. FACTORY ADJUSTMENTS ONLY, indeed!

  Somewhat reassured, he switched the format selector to RADIOGRAM , turned the process selector to DICTATE-RECORD, the translator unit to SOUTHWEST IN and ALLEGHENIAN OUT, made certain the transcription switch was on OFF, keyed his microphone button and began dictating:

  “Priority Urgent: To His Most Reverend Eminence, Sir Eric Cardinal Hoffstraff, Vicar Apostolic Designate, Provisional Vicariate Extraterrestris, Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, Vatican, New Rome...

  “Most Eminent Lord: In view of the recent renewal of world tensions, hints of a new international crisis, and even reports of a clandestine nuclear armaments race, we should be greatly honored if Your Eminence deems it prudent to counsel us concerning the present status of certain plans held in abeyance. I have reference to matters outlined in the Motu proprio of Pope Celestine the Eighth, of happy memory, given on the Feast of the Divine Overshadowing of the Holy Virgin, Anno Domini 3735, and beginning with the words–” he paused to look through the papers on his desk–” “Ab hac planeta nativitatis aliquos filios Ecclesiae usque ad planetas solium alienorum iam abisse et numquam redituros esse intelligimus.” Refer also to the confirming document of Anno Domini 3749, Quo peregrinatur grex, pastor secure, authorizing the purchase of an island, uh-certain vehicles. Lastly refer to Cam belli nunc remote, of the late Pope Paul, Anno Domini 3756, and the correspondence which followed between the Holy Father and my predecessor, culminating with an order transferring to us the task of holding the plan Quo peregrinatur in a state of, uh–suspended animation, but only so long as Your Eminence approves. Our state of readiness with respect to Quo peregrinatur has been maintained, and should it become desirable to execute the plan, we would need perhaps six weeks’ notice...”